Do you own a cool blog? Or an informative website? Or an e-commerce website? If yes, do you get a good amount of traffic? If not you can increase the traffic easily. But, what if I were to tell you that humans are not the only ones viewing your websites or articles and the people themselves don’t browse the same way each time?
There are different types of websites visitors. They can by Humans or bots. They can be further subdivided based on the browsing pattern or tasks they perform. It is really important for you to know the various kinds of websites visitors so that you can take the required decisions to cater to their needs, extract maximum benefits and avoid unnecessary issues where ever possible. You can then use Google Analytics to identify the type of visitors you are getting.
Human Websites Visitors
There are 4 major types of human visitors. This classification has been made based on the psychology of the visitor with which he or she visits the websites. Depending on what your blog or website is offering, you can choose a way to cater to the needs of the preferred type of visitors.
• The Fast Human Browser
They are the type of people who visit websites just to seek information and at the same time be entertained. They just glance through the content quickly and look out for design elements and concentrate on them after which they move on. They just want to know the summary. You can cater to these people by highlighting the most important part in the content or add illustrations.
For the Fast Human Browser, the average session duration will be short with an observed average of 6 seconds to 20 seconds on Google Analytics.
• The Focused individual
If you have an e-commerce website or a website selling some product of yours, then these kinds of websites visitors are your jewels. They come to a website intending to make a purchase. They quickly glance through what they want and make a decision whether to buy it or not. Some among these kinds of visitors tend to return to the website multiple times to make purchases. To cater to their needs, you should know how to offer the most important information about the product or service that you are selling and price the products competitively so that they choose you over the others.
The Google Analytics will reflect very low bounce rates which might be close to zero and will show large session duration. For The Focused Individual, an average session duration of more than 3 minutes can be observed.
• The Intelligent Researcher
When a person needs to gain a lot of information on a topic, he adopts the role of a researcher on the web and automatically turns intelligent, at least temporarily! They are the type of visitors who spend a lot of time on your website and possibly read every line of content. They may come back more than one time to make sure details aren’t missed. Catering to their needs requires you to have a thorough knowledge in that field so that you can provide complete and correct information.
The researcher would show similar observations on Google Analytics as The Focused Individual, like very low bounce rates but will reflect larger session duration. The average session duration, in this case, would be much larger when compared to the Focused Individual.
• The spammer
This is the irritating guy you once met who tried to tell you things that you just don’t care about. These are the type of people who comment on all possible websites to get backlinks to their own website or blog. Spammers must be ignored and the best way to do it is to let a software take care of it for you. An online software like Askimet can help you prevent spam comments.
It is hard to detect a spammer using the Google Analytics as that person can show behaviors similar to the above three types: Fast Human Browser, Intelligent Researcher, and The Focused Individual.
The Internet Bot
Internet Bots are software that perform tasks on the internet at high speed. They are responsible for the largest Internet Traffic in the world. Various types on bots exist on the internet. Search engines like Google use bots called spiders. They visit websites and index them so that it can be listed in their search results. To make the best out of these bots, your content should be SEO optimised.
Other types of bots such as crawlers are used to scan related websites for a particular type of information and this retrieved information will be used for some other purposes. Malicious bots also exist on the internet which is used for launching DDoS attack or harvesting Email-IDs from different websites. There is not much you can do to prevent them.
Observations on Google Analytics such as almost 100% bounce rates and almost 100% new visits indicate the traffic is from bots. As they perform the tasks very quickly, their visit duration as seen on Analytics, will be 0 (Zero).
Understanding and Identifying traffic on your website gives you the power to change the content or generate new ones to suit your requirements. Information gained from Google Analytics can be used as a factor in decision-making. So, what kind of traffic dominates your website? Do you know any other types of visitors? Share it with us in the comments below.
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