For your association to make data-driven decisions, analyzing the audience behavior on your association's website is an essential first step.

Web traffic analysis reveals how visitors interact with your website or association, whether they find it useful, and whether the user experience or services are compelling enough to convert them.

Tracking all these aspects and making notes is necessary, though it can be more challenging in practice due to the many components involved. However, this blog covers all the factors that help analyze your audience, so continue reading to explore the details.

Key Takeaways

• The information about where your visitors are coming from and the composition of your audience in terms of new versus returning visitors is foundational for crafting targeted marketing and engagement strategies.
• The amount of time visitors spend on your site and their engagement level (e.g., bounce rates, average session durations) are critical indicators of your website's appeal and content effectiveness.
• Monitoring conversion rates provides insight into how effectively your website turns visitors into members or customers.
• Utilizing tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, Ahrefs, Microsoft Clarity, and SimilarWeb can offer in-depth insights into audience behavior, engagement patterns, and traffic sources.
• Glue Up provides a specialized suite of analytics tools designed for associations to track engagement, membership trends, event success, and more. It offers targeted insights into visitor behavior, engagement patterns, and financial health, enabling associations to make strategic decisions and improve member retention and satisfaction.

Where Do Your Association’s Members Come From?

First things first, you need to identify the sources of your association member traffic.

• Organic Search: Determine if members are finding your website through search engines.
• Paid Traffic: Check if traffic is coming through paid ads.
• Social Media Channels: Identify if visitors are arriving from social media platforms.
• Other Sources: Consider other means through which traffic might be originating.

Understanding the origin of your association's traffic is beneficial for knowing your visitors' intent. The insight will also help you design your marketing and winning member engagement strategies.

How Many Visitors Are New and How Many Are Returning?

Analyzing the traffic to your association's website significantly involves understanding the makeup of your visitors, especially new and returning individuals.

It's better to determine whether a visitor is visiting your site for the first time or is already familiar with and revisiting it. This distinction is effective in tailoring engagement and retention strategies.

Tracking returning visitors can give you a clear idea of their engagement. Additionally, if your association consistently attracts new members, it indicates effective traffic-driving strategies from various sources.

Understanding these insights helps formulate engagement strategies and boost member retention more effectively for your association.

How Long Are Members Staying?

Once you understand whether your visitors are new or returning, the next step is to determine how long visitors stay on your site. This insight is incredibly valuable, as it helps you understand the quality of your traffic and the effectiveness of your website.

While this metric has benchmarks, analyzing visitor duration can offer a deeper understanding of your site's appeal and functionality.

Benchmarks

The average time on page benchmark across all industries is 54 seconds; for B2B, it's 1 minute and 22 seconds. If a visitor spends around 54 seconds or 1 minute and 22 seconds on your website, this duration is considered good. Similarly, you can check the average time all visitors spend on your website.
 

What Is Causing Members to Leave?

Once you've noted the time visitors spend on your website, it raises a concern that needs to be addressed if it falls below the average. You should investigate why visitors aren't staying longer. Is the website not engaging enough, or is the user experience lacking? Perhaps the website is slow, has long loading times, or has hosting issues.

There are many factors to consider. Additionally, there are benchmarks for why members might leave, which can guide you in identifying specific areas for improvement.

Benchmarks

Whatever reason visitors come to your website, it's measured by the bounce rate. A lower bounce rate indicates a better-performing website, while a higher one suggests a lower-performing one.

According to statistics, the average bounce rate across industries ranges from 41% to 51%, while for B2B websites it's between 25% and 55%. Consider optimizing your website if your bounce rate is higher than these averages.

However, optimization involves engaging content, reducing loading times, and addressing other common website issues, such as poor navigation or unresponsive design. Improving these aspects can significantly improve user experience and lower bounce rates.

Are Members Converting?

Conversion is when visitors to your website or platform take a desired action. In the context of an association, this might mean converting visitors into members.

The conversion rate is a critical metric that depends on the ratio of visitors to your site to the number of visitors who actually take a desired action, such as signing up for membership or making a purchase.

While determining whether a conversion rate is good or not, it's essential to consider industry benchmarks.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks for conversion rates vary by sector and the specific action being measured, offering a valuable point of comparison to evaluate the effectiveness of your engagement strategies and the attractiveness of your membership offering.

The average conversion rate across various industries typically ranges between 2.35% and 5.31%. Specifically, for B2B sectors, the conversion rate falls within the range of 2.23% to 4.31%. Therefore, if your association's conversion rate is within these numbers, it can be considered good.

How to Improve Member Signup and Retention?

To increase membership sign-up and retention rates, you must offer your visitors significant value by providing exactly what they seek. Delivering value means presenting them with a platform, such as a website, that is easy to navigate, fast, and intuitive.

Below is a list of strategies you can focus on to improve sign-up and retention rates:

User Experience

The website should be quick and should take no time to load. The slower the website, the higher the bounce rate will be. Studies show that 40% of users leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Therefore, make sure your website provides the best user experience to visitors with the least loading time.

User-Friendly Website Design

The website design should be user-friendly, with user experience in mind. It should make it easy for visitors to find what they need and take action.

Quality Content

Offer high-quality, relevant content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience, establishing your association as a valuable resource.

Personalized Experience

Use data analytics to offer personalized experiences to your visitors, such as content recommendations or targeted offers, which can increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Clear Value Proposition

Communicate the association membership benefits clearly and effectively so visitors understand the value of joining.

Easy Sign-Up Process

Simplify the sign-up process to reduce barriers to membership. Consider using social media logins or shortening the form fields required for registration.

Engagement and Interaction

Integrate interactive elements like forums, polls, or live chats to boost association engagement. This interaction can build a feeling of community and promote loyalty.

Feedback Mechanism

Implement a system to gather member feedback. Understanding and addressing the needs and concerns of your members can significantly enhance retention.

Regular Updates and Improvements

Continuously update your website and membership offerings based on feedback and evolving member needs, showing that you value their satisfaction and are committed to providing value.

Mobile Optimization

Make your website fully optimized for mobile devices and offer a seamless experience for users on the go.

Free Website Traffic Analysis Tools

Once you have information on where your visitors are coming from, how long they are staying, how many are bouncing, and what issues they might face, you can analyze your web traffic using website traffic analysis tools.

These tools provide comprehensive insights into your audience's behavior so you can make informed decisions and optimize your website for better engagement and conversion.

Here are a few free tools that can help you analyze your website audience:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool millions of companies use for the same purpose as yours: to analyze web traffic and understand consumer behavior. Google Analytics provides free tools, and you can find more than 200 metrics on Google Analytics. At the same time, we enlist a few metrics that are in demand.

• Users: A user is a unique or new visitor to the website.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
• Sessions: A period of time a user is actively engaged with your website.
• Average session duration: The average amount of time users spend on your site.
• Percentage of new sessions: The percentage of sessions from first-time visitors.
• Goal completions: The number of times users completed a specific goal on your site.
• Page views: The total number of pages viewed by users.
• Language: The language settings of the users' browsers.
• Browser type: The type of web browser used by the users.
• City and country: The geographical location of the users.
• Models of devices: The types of devices used by the users.
• User age group: The age group of the users.

Semrush Free Website Traffic Checker

Semrush Traffic Analytics is a market intelligence and competitive research tool that estimates any website’s desktop and mobile traffic. It can help you benchmark and evaluate member behavior for your association website. Here are some of its features:

• Estimates of total website traffic to any domain, subdomains, and subfolders.
• Visits, unique visitors, pages/visits, average visit duration, and bounce rate analysis.
• Traffic channels.
• Geolocation-based web traffic analysis.
• Top “destination sites” that users visit directly through hyperlinks on the analyzed domain.
• Historical data back to 5-6 years.
• Mobile/desktop traffic.
• Audiences’ overlaps.
• Comparison for up to 5 domains.

Ahrefs Website Traffic Checker

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a powerful, free SEO tool that analyzes traffic and monitors the SEO health of your association website. It provides valuable insights that can help website owners understand and analyze their websites’ traffic patterns and the keywords that drive the most traffic to their sites.

Here are some of its useful features:

• Monitors and tracks your website’s organic search traffic.
• Tracks the keywords that drive traffic to your website and lets you get insights into their SEO data.
• Identifies which sites compete for the same keywords as yours.
• Comes with other helpful SEO features (backlink analysis and technical site auditing).

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is another helpful tool for analyzing your association's web traffic. It is a user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website. Supported features include:

• Session Recordings: Recordings of user sessions on your website, showing mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls.
• Heatmaps: Visual representations of where users click, move the mouse, or scroll on your website.
• ML Insights: Machine learning insights that provide deeper analysis and understanding of user behavior on your website.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is another tool that can help your association website estimate the total amount of traffic different websites get. It allows you to see competitors’ top traffic sources, broken down into six major categories, including referring sites, social traffic, and top search keywords. Here are its key features:
 

• Traffic Overview: Provides an overview of a website's traffic metrics.
• Total Visits: Estimates the total number of visits to a website.
• Engagement Metrics: Measures user engagement on a website.
• Traffic Sources: Analyzes the sources of traffic to a website.
• Referrals: Identifies websites that refer traffic to a given website.
• Audience Interests: Provides insights into the interests of a website's audience.
• Categories: Classifies websites into categories based on their content.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is an open-source alternative to commercial web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. This software allows you to stay in control of the data you collect about the users of your websites or applications. Here are its key features:
 

• Track visitors, page views, and configurable actions.
• Track an unlimited number of websites using a single instance of the OWA Server.
• First-party JavaScript tracker client.
• Reporting Dashboard/Portal.
• View and customize all reports.
• Generate Heatmaps.
• Generate "Domstream" session recordings.
• Geolocation of visitors.
• Multi-user reporting interface.
• Extensible framework via custom modules.

Step Up Your Association with Glue Up: The All-In-One Association Management Software

Glue Up's AI-powered association management software provides associations with a suite of analytics tools to track engagement, membership trends, event success, and more.

The software helps associations understand not only the volume of their site traffic but also how visitors interact with their content. This leads to more strategic decision-making, as it offers targeted insights into visitor behavior and engagement patterns.

Here are some of its highlighted key analytics features:

Membership Analytics

Membership Analytics allow you to analyze growth trends and patterns and help you understand how your membership base changes over time.

Moreover, this feature also tracks retention rates and analyzes membership lifecycle stages, empowering you to develop targeted retention strategies and understand member preferences.

Event Analytics

Event Analytics measures attendee engagement and participation levels, providing insights into the success of your events and identifying areas for improvement.

Additionally, it gathers post-event feedback and satisfaction scores, which can help improve attendee experiences in future events.

Engagement Analytics

Engagement Analytics focuses on monitoring interactions with emails, newsletters, and announcements and assessing the effectiveness of communication strategies.

It also includes website and app engagement metrics like page views and session duration, which are essential for refining online content and user experience.

Financial Analytics

Financial Analytics feature comprehensive financial reporting for various revenue streams, such as membership dues and event tickets, offering a clear view of your financial health.

Expense tracking and budget comparison are also part of this feature, helping finance management and forecasting future trends.

Campaign Analytics

Campaign Analytics evaluate the performance of email campaigns through key metrics like open rates and conversion metrics, aiding in the optimization of email marketing strategies.

Besides, this feature also assesses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns across channels, utilizing A/B testing results for strategy refinement.

Custom Reports

Custom reports allow you to create reports designed to your specific needs, allowing you to focus on analyzing important metrics. Customizable dashboards are also available for real-time metric monitoring, providing immediate insights for swift decision-making.

These analytics capabilities help associations make informed decisions, design strategies to meet member needs and drive growth and engagement. Book a demo today to see how Glue Up can transform your association’s approach to analytics and engagement.