http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/ en vmills@concordwebsolutions.com Copyright 2008 2008-05-16T22:45:00-05:00 http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/bounce-rates/ http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/bounce-rates/#When:22:45:00Z Driving targeted traffic to your web site is one of the most important goals of web marketing. But what if you are getting lots of relevant traffic and not seeing much business from it? One place to look is the Bounce Rate. Here is Google’s own definition of Bounce Rate: “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” In other words, if you are driving targeted traffic to your web site and you have a high bounce rate, the problem is not with your visitors but with your site. Driving targeted traffic to your web site is one of the most important goals of web marketing. But what if you are getting lots of relevant traffic and not seeing much business from it? One place to look is the Bounce Rate. Here is Google’s own definition of Bounce Rate: “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” In other words, if you are driving targeted traffic to your web site and you have a high bounce rate, the problem is not with your visitors but with your site. Your overall Bounce Rate is right there on the dashboard when you first log in to Google Analytics, but it’s more useful when viewed on other reports, such as All Traffic Sources, Keyword, or Content. Perhaps you’ve purchased a link on another site and want to get a better idea of the quality of traffic from that site. Take a quick look at the bounce rate and compare it to the rate for other traffic sources on your site. You can also look at the bounce rate for various keyword phrases to see if your content is engaging searchers who are using terms that are relevant to your products and services. Looking at the bounce rate for particular pages on your web site can also give you helpful feedback on how well your content is working. Look at the Top Landing Pages report and pick a page with a relatively high Bounce Rate. (Landing pages are the pages on which visitors entered your site.) Click on the name of that page (the underlined link in the left column). On the next screen you can use the Analyze pull-down menu to select Entrance Keywords. From here you can see the Bounce Rates for all the keyword phrases used by searchers who landed on that page. Cool! You get a clear snapshot of the nature of your search engine traffic and how well your content is holding those visitors’ interest. If you are running an Adwords campaign, the Bounce Rate is a great indicator of the health of your Ad Groups. You certainly don’t want to be paying for clicks when the visitors hop off your site the second they land. The Bounce Rate won’t tell you what is wrong, only that something is. If you’re seeing a high Bounce Rate for a certain Ad Group, look at the rates for individual keywords in that Ad Group. Is there one phrase with a very high Bounce Rate? If so, it could be that you are buying a keyword phrase that is not well targeted, or it could be that the landing page for that ad is not relevant or compelling enough to engage your visitors. As with all metrics, you should be careful to consider Bounce Rates in context. For example, if you have an Adwords campaign that drives visitors to a landing page for a product or service they can buy on that page through a 3rd party service (meaning the visitor will leave your site to make the purchase), then a 1-page visit isn’t such a bad thing. Another place where a high Bounce Rate may not be bad is for a blog where the full text of all the posts is on the home page. Visitors may spend a lot of time with that page, but it still shows a high bounce rate. Also keep in mind that at very low levels of traffic the Bounce Rate becomes less meaningful. If 3 searchers landed on your blue widgets page after typing “blue widgets” in the search engines, and the Bounce Rate is 66%, well it could just be that you’ve run into some Nutty Searchers. “Oh, I didn’t mean to type blue widgets; I meant to type red widgets” or “Just as I hit “Search” the dog ran off with the remote and I had to give chase.” Nutty Searchers happen. It’s never very accurate to generalize about “good” and “bad” rates in web marketing (better to look at your own trends over time), but that said, I tend to think of bounce rates in the 30-40% range as “OK.” Lower bounce rates than that are quite good – the higher the rate, the more likely there is a problem. Analytics 2008-05-16T22:45:00-05:00 http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/what-is-the-secret-to-web-site-success/ http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/what-is-the-secret-to-web-site-success/#When:22:03:00Z Analytics. Here’s why: If you have analytics in place and review the data regularly to extract actionable insights, then several things are probably already happening.Analytics. Here’s why: If you have analytics in place and review the data regularly to extract actionable insights, then several things are probably already happening. You are thinking about your visitors—and not just the ones you wish would come, but the ones who actually do visit your site. Thinking about your visitors will in all likelihood lead you to think about the content on your web site and whether is it attracting the quantity and quality of visitors you wish to have. After some weeks reviewing your data, it will probably occur to you that not much will change unless you actually do something that will improve your web site or online marketing activities. With analytics in place, you can plan on how you will measure the results of changes to your web site or marketing activities. This is called testing. When you begin to think about how to measure your results, you will probably realize that you really need to know what you want visitors to do on your web site. In short, you need to have goals. Now that you have goals, an action plan, and a way to measure results, you’ve created a system that will make your web marketing costs go down and your success rate go up. Test, measure, assess. Then do it again and again and again. That’s all there is to it! Web Marketing 2008-05-14T22:03:00-05:00 http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/how-to-filter-your-own-visits-from-google-analytics-data/ http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/how-to-filter-your-own-visits-from-google-analytics-data/#When:22:06:01Z You’ll get a more accurate picture of your web site’s “real” visitors if you filter your company’s own visits to your web site. This can easily be done If you have a static IP addres, an identifying web address that never changes when your computer connects to the internet. Usually, you’ll know if you have one because you requested one from your ISP (such as Verizon or Comcast), or your IT person got one for you when s/he set up your computer network.You’ll get a more accurate picture of your web site’s “real” visitors if you filter your company’s own visits to your web site. This can easily be done If you have a static IP address, an identifying web address that never changes when your computer connects to the internet. Usually, you’ll know if you have one because you requested one from your ISP (such as Verizon or Comcast), or your IT person got one for you when s/he set up your computer network. Once you know your IP address, you simply add a Filter to Google Analytics under “Settings”. Click Filter Manager from the Analytics Settings page Enter a Filter Name, such as “Exclude My Company Visits” From the Filter Type drop-down list, select Exclude all traffic from an IP address The IP address field will auto-populate with an example IP address showing dots and backslashes. Enter the correct value, but keep the dots and backslashes; those are necessary for Google to read the address properly. For example, if the IP address to filter is 176.168.1.1 then the IP address value will be 176.168.1.1 If you connect to the internet with a dynamic IP address (which is the default for most cable and DSL connections), your IP address is subject to change. In some cases the IP address will change infrequently, so you can still filter it from your data, but you’ll have to check the address periodically to make sure it stays the same. You can do this through sites like What’s My IP?   Analytics 2008-05-09T22:06:01-05:00 http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/google-analytics-weighing-the-pros-and-cons/ http://www.concordwebsolutions.com/web/tips/google-analytics-weighing-the-pros-and-cons/#When:20:02:00Z For those of you who would skip to it anyway, here is The bottom line: For many of my clients, the decision is not about which web analytics tool to use, but whether to use any tool at all. It is particularly because of these clients that I can say I love Google Analytics. For those clients who understand the need for web analytics and who are actively trying to improve site performance, GA is a valuable tool that will allow them to focus their resources where they can have the most impact: on human intelligence and site changes. For those of you who would skip to it anyway, here is The bottom line: For many of my clients, the decision is not about which web analytics tool to use, but whether to use any tool at all. It is particularly because of these clients that I can say I love Google Analytics. For those clients who understand the need for web analytics and who are actively trying to improve site performance, GA is a valuable tool that will allow them to focus their resources where they can have the most impact: on human intelligence and site changes. Pros It’s free. This is a big one. Analytics tools have grown to be very expensive, ranging from hundreds of dollars at the low end to 5 and 6 figures at the high end. Free is good. Extensive Reports. Traffic sources, keywords, conversions—it’s all there. GA makes some things easier to track, like bounce rates for your traffic sources or keyword phrases, while for others you have to noodle around a bit. For example, to track conversions by source, you have to first go to traffic sources, then click on the Goal Conversions tab, then sort by goals. Wouldn’t it be easier to get to this through the main Goals section? Clear User Interface. For most site owners, making sense of web analytics data is a great challenge. Google revamped the interface of its Analytics program in mid 2007, making it much more user friendly Excellent integration with Google Adwords. If you are running a Google Adwords campaign, one of your primary questions will be how well Adwords is performing compared to organic search and other traffic searches. With one click integration between GA and Adwords, it’s easy to review Adwords performance in context of your other web site traffic. No log files required. There are two main options for collecting data on your web site’s performance: log file analysis or page tagging. Google uses the latter method, which means you can add a bit of code to each page of your site and start collecting data. Having worked with log files for a number of years, I can attest to numerous complications when relying on them. Every hosting company seems to have a different server configuration and getting access to properly configured log files is not always easy. Wide adoption. This has long been one of the critical factors I consider when deciding whether to use a piece of software or service in the web world. Things change so quickly on the web. What’s the likelihood that a given tool will be here in 5 years? Equally important, what’s the likelihood that it will continue to be supported and improved? GA is quickly becoming the standard web analytics tool for small businesses. Not only does this bode well for it’s future, it means that site owners are likely to be able to count on getting appropriate support because of the large population familiar with the service. It should also be easier to integrate Google Analytics with other online services because of its wide adoption. It’s free. Did I say that already? Cons Google has all your data. One of the reasons Google is giving analytics away is that by doing so it can collect massive amounts of data on web site performance, much of it tied to Google Adwords. Some search marketers are concerned that handing over that much valuable business information isn’t wise, but I can’t see how it could harm small businesses. If I were a Fortune 100 company, I’d have second thoughts, but then I’d probably be using an enterprise level analytics tool rather than GA. Limited support. There is a GA discussion group and a GA blog, but if you have a specific question or problem, you’re likely to need lots of time or money to get it resolved. Google Analytics Authorized Consultants are available, but their pricing is relatively high. Nevertheless, as GA has grown more prevalent, these support issues have eased because so much knowledge is being shared on the web about specific configuration issues. Reports are not easily customizable. This may be a quibble for a free program, but these are the issues that give me nits to pick. Why can’t I get a bar chart of visitors by month in this program? Conversions are given as percentages, rather than actual counts. So I have to take out the calculator to compare GA conversion data with my counts of emails, newsletter signups, etc. Hopefully Google will add these features down the road. [Note: new features added in May 08 now let you look at a line chart by month – progress!] No log files used. The data Google collects is stored in their servers. You can’t analyze historical data, nor can you re-analyze data based on changed settings. If you’ve been collecting data for a year in GA and decide to set up a goal for conversion tracking today, you will only be able to see the conversion data starting tomorrow. If something happens to Google’s data, well, you’re out of luck. Analytics 2008-05-02T20:02:00-05:00