Understanding whether your website is attracting the right audience is critical for marketers, especially when you need to show results and prove the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts.
But how do you ensure that the people landing on your site match your ideal customer profiles?
Until now, that would take a lot of manual analysis.
Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), there's now a more effective and efficient way to identify if your website visitors align with your target audience. In this article, I’ll walk you through a practical process that uses ChatGPT to analyze your visitors and compare them with your pre-defined customer personas. Plus, you’ll see a video demonstration I made that shows you exactly how to do this for your business.
The pre-requisites?
The first step is identifying who is visiting your website. Not who Google Analytics tells you is visiting, but actual people.
We recently redesigned our website, and I want to see if it’s attracting our target ICP. So I downloaded a free trial of RB2B and embedded the code on our website. It identifies about 20% of our visitors.
Before that creeps you out, let me say that I have no intention of connecting with them on LinkedIn, filling their inbox with email or calling them. I only want to analyze the data it gives me.
Using RB2B or specialized tools that embed tracking codes on your website, you can gather person-level data on a subset of your visitors. This data includes crucial details like their names, LinkedIn profile links, and pages they visited. While this might seem intrusive, the responsible use of such information can provide valuable insights into whether you're attracting the right audience.
Remember, I’m only using this data to analyze our audience and see if our website redesign was effective from the standpoint of attracting the right visitors.
By analyzing this website visitor data, you can start building a picture of whether your website is pulling in the people who are most likely to become paying customers. Tracking who’s visiting, what pages they’re viewing, and what content they visit can give you a better idea of the effectiveness of your website.
Now that I’ve collected visitor data, it’s time to analyze it using AI. The reason I thought to use AI is because AI is faster and more efficient than human analysis.
I exported our actual website visitors into a CSV file from RB2B.
The next step was to upload the website visitor data into ChatGPT, then ask ChatGPT to analyze the data and answer key questions like:
These insights are invaluable. For instance, the AI might reveal that many of your visitors work in industries that aren’t in your target market or are primarily entry-level employees, meaning they might not be decision-makers. On the flip side, you might discover that most of your traffic comes from senior leaders in the very industries you're targeting. These are the kinds of insights that can refine your content strategy and help you focus on attracting even more high-value visitors.
This step can save hours of manual analysis. Instead of sifting through data yourself, the AI does the heavy lifting, offering detailed insights that you can use to build stronger presentations for your CEO or leadership team. This efficiency not only saves you time but also empowers you with data-driven recommendations that will resonate with leadership.
Here’s where things get really interesting: comparing the AI-generated website visitor analysis to your predefined customer personas.
So I uploaded our customer persona document for comparison purposes to ChatGPT. Keep in mind that I have a paid account, so my data is private.
As demonstrated in the video, AI can quickly tell you whether the people visiting your website match the characteristics of your ideal customers. You’ll see that our website visitors were mostly from a few of our target industries like healthcare and professional services, which confirmed that the content on our new website was attracting the right people.
By uploading our personas into the AI tool, I can ask it to compare the visitors to our profiles using their LinkedIn profiles, which pulls job title, seniority, industry, etc. The AI will identify how well the visitors align with these personas and even suggest ways to improve content or messaging to attract more of the right people.
This comparison step is crucial because it tests the alignment of website content with the personas you’ve worked hard to define. It helps you answer the question, “Are we attracting the people we want as customers?”
One of the most valuable aspects of using AI is that it doesn’t just tell you who’s visiting your site—it can also give you actionable insights on how to improve your website for those visitors.
In the video, you’ll see how the AI tool analyzed the behavior of website visitors and recommended changes to the website’s content. For example, it suggested focusing on ROI and success stories for more senior decision makers, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining educational blog content for those in the awareness or consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Using AI to analyze your visitors and the pages they visit might show you that blog posts are the most visited type of content on your website, signaling strong interest in thought leadership.
In response, you can boost efforts to create more educational content that resonates with those early in their research process. You can create similar content to hand out at trade shows. It can inform your sales team to share content that educates.
This data can also help you justify budget allocation to content creation, knowing that ideal customers are reading what you’re publishing.
At Whittington Consulting, we believe that making your website a sales engine is about attracting the right visitors and converting them into leads. By using AI to compare actual website visitors to your ideal customer personas, you can quickly identify gaps in your strategy and make data-driven decisions that increase your chances of attracting the right traffic.
If you're looking for ways to attract the right visitors, AI-driven visitor analysis can take your website from good to great.
By incorporating these AI insights into your marketing strategy, you’ll not only attract the right audience but also turn your website into a powerful sales engine that drives business growth.
If you’d like to incorporate AI into your process or find additional use cases for AI in your organization, feel free to reach out!
If you found this article insightful, you may be interested in learning about some use cases for your own marketing processes. We are currently building custom AI applications for clients to find marketing and sales opportunities. These apps have produced insights in minutes that would have taken a PhD-level data scientist days to create. If you'd like to discuss these applications for your business, please contact us here for a conversation.