Where Do Your Website's Visitors Come From?

One of the things you can learn by looking at your Google Analytics is where your visitors are when they come to your website. Just click on "Map Overlay" at your analytics dashboard, and you'll see a phrase like "3213 visitors came from 92 countries." You can then look closer and see the region, state, or city your visitors were in.

If it's a personal website you're looking at, you can respond to this with, "Wow, cool, people from Hungary come to see me!" If you've got a business website, this information can be more useful than that.

First, consider whether you can actually sell goods or services to people from 92 countries. If you have local business -- a brick and mortar store, a service that requires your physical presence, things like that -- then it may still be cool to have visitors from 92 countries, but you want the great majority of your visitors to be local. If they're not, then you need to do more linking with local sites, to encourage your actual customers to visit your website.

One company I'm working with right now sells chocolate. They're happy to ship, but not to tropical countries, and not to subtropical states like mine except in winter. So a preponderance of visitors from hot places would tell us that we're not focusing on the right geographical areas in our marketing.

If you have a national or a global reach, you can still benefit from the information. The school supply company I work with serves the entire country, but school calendars differ from one state to another. Seeing when New York's teachers start their Back to School browsing lets us target our marketing and plan for staffing and stocking needs -- if we relied only on the data from the local brick and mortar store, we'd miss those opportunities.

Watch for changes, too. A sudden spike in visitors from Milwaukee? Then you need to find out what happened there -- a radio show? a local mention of your name in the paper or of your product at a workshop? Find out so you can repeat the effect.

Finally, you can look more closely at a particular population's activity once they reach your website. Is the content your visitors from India choose to look at different from that most popular with your visitors from the UK? Do some countries have a higher conversion rate than others -- and if so, might you want to focus efforts on them rather than on the people who look but don't buy? Or do you just need to tweak your message to increase conversion from that other location?

The map overlay doesn't need to be a daily check, but it should be something you look at before your next marketing strategy meeting.

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