In an effort to further engage our website visitors, we installed live chat software as a hosted application.  We typically get 60-90 visitors  per day. In six months, we have had two chat requests.  And, I learned early on that sending a chat invite to a visitor absolutely scares them away.  But, the real value of the software is in being able to see what your visitors are looking for in real time.

If you are using Google Adwords, you can see the exact search phrases  that are being clicked.  Unless you are much more sophisticated than I was about the generosity of Google’s “broad matching” parameters, you might be shocked at how many of your clicks are wasted.  As a result of this somewhat costly education, we tuned up the negative keywords list significantly and changed most of the keywords to a “must contain” match.  The net result has been that we’re getting the same amount of traffic, but it’s much more relevant.

We can also see where our visitors are from geographically, and in many cases, we can identify the organization.  I’ve had a number of cases of seeing a visitor from a company where I know some one.  And, I’ve sent emails that say “we had a web visitor from your shop.  If some one is looking for etching, we hope you’ll keep us in mind.”

Being able to see the daily traffic live also gives you a sense of what the hot search topics are.  We use it to expand site content, modify the keyword list and suggest topics for newsletters  (and the blog.)

And, sometimes, people want to chat.