I wandered into a sporting goods store the other day looking for a specific item, looked around for a few minutes, didn't find it, and left. I went to another store and found what I was looking for and everything was right with the world. I couldn't help but thinking, however, that the first store missed an opportunity when they noticed me, the empty handed customer, walking out of their store dissatisfied with my experience. What was I looking for? Did I find it? If so, why didn't I buy it? Wouldn't it be nice if you could interview every customer who walked out of the store without making a purchase and figure out why?

To some degree, you can do just that with web analytics. Depending on the level of analytics available to you, you can go into various degrees of depth to find out why customers are leaving your site. First, a quick examination of top exit pages will show you where your visitors are leaving from. This can be telling if a large percentage of your site's traffic is exiting from one location. That page is likely not providing visitors with the right information, does not offer a clear next step, or confuses them in some other means. The moral of the story, of course, is fix that page.

Another easy method is to look for pages with a high bounce rate. A "bounce" is when a visitor enters a site and leaves without viewing another page. Like the Head and Shoulders ad campaign in the 1990s, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and where visitors land on your site can make all the difference in the world. For sites that have not undergone search engine optimization, or have poorly thought out PPC (pay per click) campaigns, many visitors may be landing on sub-optimal, or worse, the wrong page. Imagine yourself walking into a store looking for lawn furniture and the only items immediately visible are cell phones. You might walk a few aisles in to see if the lawn furniture is there, but chances are that you'll turn around and walk out unless you stumble across something related to lawn furniture relatively quickly.

Putting yourself in the hyper-condensed world of the web makes this doubly dangerous. It's even easier to click the back button than it is to turn around and walk out of a store that you spent your valuable time to get to. As a website owner, the advantage here is that you have much more control over that first impression. If someone searches "lawn furniture" on Google, make sure that your PPC campaign lands them in the most appropriate page on your site, don't just send them to the home page. Give people what they want as quickly as possible!

Finally, for sites with an internal search function, tracking those searches can provide a wealth of information. If you see a consistent demand for certain terms on internal search, it becomes obvious that your site is not providing an intuitive path to find these items. Further, it may show you items that customers expect you to carry but you don't. This is the equivalent of my sporting goods experience, except when I left the employees could look at a printout of the items I was looking for. I would tend to believe that would be useful information in regard to selecting what products to carry.

So if you've ever wondered why customers aren't making purchases, or why they're not buying more, now's your chance. With basic web analytics you can start to understand why visitors are abandoning your site, what they want, and whether or not they're finding it. Web analytics can change the paradigm, and soon you can be explaining why customers are buying instead of asking yourself why not.