360DigitalInfluence

Last week I attended an all day training seminar on Google Analytics in order to hone my skills with this fabulous FREE web site analytics tool offered by Google.   If you work with Web sites in any capacity you should understand the basic metrics that are used to   measure the performance of a web site.   The following are some basic concepts that are used to analyze web site behavior:

ALWAYS Define A GOAL for Success - An increased number of visitors should NEVER be your goal for success.   What if the majority of people that come to your site leave within 10 seconds?   What kind of value does that provide?   Just because you are not selling something does not mean there aren’t desired actions you want your visitors to take that represent a deeper level of engagement, and therefore a greater value.   Once you define an action that you want your visitors to take you can measure success based on your conversion rate (the number of people who perform this action divided by the number of people who had the opportunity to perform that task).

The above conversion funnel from the Google analytics interface shows a goal of downloading a press release.   Of the 27,145 people who entered the site on the homepage, 701 people downloaded the press release, which yielded a conversion rate of 2.58%.

Now you can ask yourself the question of what can we we do to improve our conversion rate.   Maybe the press release needs a better call-out on a section of the page that receives more focus.   Maybe the call-to-action copy could be stronger.   Maybe the press release is old news, or worse, not news-worthy at all.   In no way way does a conversion have to be a sale.   Set up goals for RSS subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups, “email-a-friend” or social media buttons clicks.   There is NO excuse not to have goals that represent increased visitor engagement.

Bounce Rate - This is defined as the percentage of people who come to a page on your site, and leave without viewing any more pages.   Bounce rates can range significantly depending on the objectives of the site.   As a very general rule of thumb, a bounce rate of 35% and below is considered good, and anything above 50% could be improved.   Google Analytics allows you to segment bounce rate by entry page and the search keyword which led the visitor to find that page.   The following graph shows what keywords which led someone to this page yielded a below average bounce rate and what keywords yield an above average bounce rate (compared to average of entire site):

The majority of visitors only came to the site once within the selected time period.   As the visitors become increasingly loyal (returned more times) their numbers become less.   Ask yourself what you can do to your site to make people want to return.   Implementing RSS functionality so visitors can subscribe to your feed and be notified every time you make an update is a great way to increase the number of return visitors.   This of course could be debated as many people who use RSS read your content within the confines of their feed reader without returning to your site, but that’s topic for another post.

I have merely scratched the surface of what Google Analytics can offer your Web site.   If you are not utilizing this free tool please do so as soon as possible.   Web behavior data will not provide all the answers, and it will certainly not tell you exactly what to do, but the fact is the numbers don’t lie.   As much as you may think you know what your customers, members, or information seekers want, you really don’t.   The best thing you can do is learn from the numbers, test, test, and test again, which brings us to Google’s next free tool for achieving success with your website: Google Website Optimizer.