Three Ways to Capture Data on Your Website | Storm Internet

Three Ways to Capture Data on Your Website

Sending traffic to your website takes a lot of effort, whether that’s through SEO, referral traffic, social media or other forms of advertising. The sad truth is that a lot of those visitors will come and go and probably never return. Capturing their details is one way to remarket to them in the future and bring them back to your website once again.

Email Capture Forms

Probably the most common method you will have come across is the traditional email capture form. You can test different variations of the capture form to see which one converts the best. Typically you will need to offer some sort of incentive to encourage visitors to join your mailing list. This could be in the form of a free ebook/guide, an exclusive discount code for their first purchase, or some other redeemable voucher/coupon. Once you have a list of email contacts with a genuine interest in your business, you have a new funnel to market to.

Google Adwords Remarketing Tag

Have you ever visited a website then just hours or even days later you see an ad for that same website as you browse through other unrelated things? This is a highly targeted remarketing ad, it’s shown only to you based on your previous browsing behaviour. It’s run through Google Adwords and the good news is, you too can set-up one up for your business in a few easy steps.

This type of data capture works by using a snippet of code known as a remarketing tag, which is provided through Adwords. A pixel is placed universally on your website and saves visitors cookies to a list within Adwords. Once you have this information you can then set-up a campaign in Ad Exchange to target only to those people who have previously visited your website.

Lock Them into Your Social Channels

Encouraging your website visitors to join your social community is another way to capture information via social media. Having visible social icons on your website is a good start, from here visitors might ‘like’ your page on Facebook or give you a ‘follow’ on Twitter. But, you can also take this one step further and offer incentives to join your social community, ‘like us on Facebook and enter our monthly giveaway’, or ‘follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss our exclusive discounts’. This is just one more method to remarket to previous visitors, plus growing your social community also builds buyer trust and social reputation.

Similarly to the Google Adwords remarketing pixel, both Facebook and Twitter offer a way to capture lists of data in their advertising platforms.

In cases where you are using cookies or capturing sensitive/private data of any form, it’s advisable to have a clear privacy policy shown on your website. Any attempts to deceive a visitor into giving away their contact information is a wasted effort. An opted-in contact for a mailing list will deliver a much higher return for your business compared to someone who has no real interest in your content or communications.