Of the many visitors to your site each day, some might check out your service, visit a few pages…maybe even sign up and become a customer (the best kind of visitors!). All of your favorite analytics software can show you these visitors with numbers and graphs, but what about the actual people behind those numbers?
Getting a better perspective on visitors
We recently blogged about using Olark to view real-time context about your visitors, right from your buddy list. To cover some basics, we show you the approximate location where your visitor comes from:
…but location may not be the most important piece of context about your visitors. What are their names? Are they existing customers? Were they referred from an ad campaign? Did they land on your payment page previously? This is information that you might have access to, but you don’t have a way of viewing it easily in real-time.
Bringing relevant customer information up front
Using our powerful Javascript Chat API, you can now display this information in real-time as visitors land on your website. Here are some neat tricks you can use:
Do you have the full name of your registered users? Show that customer name in your buddy list, and never forget who you’re talking to:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorNickname', {
snippet: "John Doe"
});
</script>
Do you collect email addresses on your website? Show that email address in your buddy list so that you can follow up over email after striking up a chat:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorNickname', {
snippet: "sally@example.com"
});
</script>
Want to know which visitors are looking at your payment page? Just add a label to highlight those visitors:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorNickname', {
snippet: "on payment page"
});
</script>
To get this visitor information from your website, you could use PHP variables:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorNickname', {
snippet: "<?= $email_address ?>"
});
</script>
…or even jQuery elements from the HTML itself:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorNickname', {
snippet: $("#username").text()
});
</script>
…you get the idea.
Other ways to view visitor information
Sometimes you may have too much information for a nickname, or maybe you use a chat system like Gtalk that doesn’t allow Olark to update the nicknames. Don’t despair! We allow you to change the visitor status message as well:
<script type="text/javascript">
olark('api.chat.updateVisitorStatus', {
snippet: "arrived from Adwords Campaign"
});
</script>
Take a look at our post about viewing live info about visitors for more details about how to view this in your instant messenger.
What kind of per-visitor information do you find most valuable? And what other tools are you using to view that information?