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There are many ways to analyze web traffic and web effectiveness. In fact, there are so many ways that most small business marketers can get overwhelmed pretty quickly.
The first step of course is to begin the practice of measuring and analyzing your web site’s effectiveness so that you can improve it. The easiest way to accomplish this is to install and use the free Google Analytics tool.
Once you this you can start to understand and tweak the many things it can measure. While there is no one metric that is the golden key, I suggest you start by gaining a full understanding of what Google calls bounce rate.
Bounce rate represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. So, for the most part this is often referred to a the measure of a site’s stickyness. It can give you some clues as to whether or not your content is grabbing folks or not. It can also help you understand if your ads are targeting the right traffic.
There is no perfect bounce rate number, but aiming for 50% - meaning 50% of the visitors to your site take an action leading to another page, is probably a good target. The real goal of course is designing a site and pages that allow you to lower the bounce rate. Before you ever really worry about generating all kinds of traffic and winning key search phrases, get you content sticky!
The following video of Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics Evangelist and author of the blog Occam’s Razor helps shed some light on the bounce rate metric.
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This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at Aug 29, 08 | 5:44 am and is filed under Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Thanks for the article on Google Analytics and in particular on bounce rate.
Google Analytics is a great tool and gives you the bounce rate for visitors by country or city, by keywords, by referring URLs, etc. Very useful to see where your visitors are coming from and if they stay on your site
Roger Ellerton
http://www.renewal.ca
A worry I have with some of these free services is who else is able to view the information. I don’t want to allow my client’s competitors to view vital statistics and I know of situations where companies have utilized analytic tools and site vistors (with minimal tech-savvy) were able to view their stats. Who is all able to view this information? Can Google? And is there a way to secure it so only we can?
BTW - Reading Duct Tape Marketing right now and love it!
Aaron, you raise a question that I have always thought about. Now, that many programs are moving online, who does own what data? I have always been sensitive on uploading data bases that I have collected, especially when I told them I would not share it. Sounds archaic?
Easy questions, tough answers in today’s world. Maybe, we think this way because we were conditioned with required reading of Fahrenheit451. If we just burn that book?
P.S. Think about the data Google gave to Viacom.
Yes, John the article was good. But my plans this weekend was to be philosophical!
Pay attention to Google Analytics for sure, but as well remember that many visitors use plug ins for their browsers that stop this and other java-scripts from working. So use the analytics as a guide not gospel!
http://www.leeraito.com
Good article focusing us on using the information we already have more effectively.
The full video has other examples of how to get the most from Analytics.
http://www.webanalyticshour.com/authors_at_google_avinash_kaushik.shtml
Regards,
Michael
I had doubt regarding bounce rates, as my websites shows me 50% bounce rate, means, 50% of my visitors are worthless for me. and i found this type of problem when i get spammy visits from social networking websites. I still don’t understand what to do for decreasing this bounce rate because of social media sites, i can’t stop posting in it, and i don;t want those spammy visits. please give suggestion on the same.
It’s amazing how clients get so caught up on the wrong metrics. I have a client that only cares about time spent on the site. In their minds that is the only one that matters. Very frustrating.
It’s been really tough trying to reduce my bounce rate. It is above 50%, but I can’t seem to get it close to that. I agree with others that social media sites sometimes bring in spammy visitors that screw up my bounce rate. For now, I am just trying to increase my traffic the natural way and hope my rate goes down as I continue to do so.
Well time on site can relate to bounce rate. Keep in mind the real definition of Bounce Rate takes “Time” into consideration. Google analytics doesn’t consider time in reporting a bounce rate, but from an SEO standpoint top SEO’s will tell you there is a big difference between a read time of <5 seconds or so vs. the satisfaction of someone who was on your page for a minute or more. It’s one of the ways to evaluate spam or pages who don’t deserve to get traffic.
When you think of Bounce Rates, you have to also consider time on the blog or page. If someone is bouncing quickly the assumption is your page is junk…not at all what the searcher wanted.
If you are bouncing after a relativly longer period of engagement…then the problem is most likely in your call to action.
For Business Bloggers you frequently see blogs with long engagement times…our average for Compendium is nearly two minutes…but often that still registers as a bounce if you can’t compel the reader to take some other action on the blog page.
Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
http://www.compendiumblogware.com