How do you track visits to your website or blog? If you are are using Google Analytics you might be familiar with the term Bounce Rate. But what is Bounce Rate? The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a single-page and then bounce from your site. If you have 1000 visitors on your site and 200 visit other pages on your site besides the home page, your Bounce Rate would be 80 percent. That’s because 800 of those visitors hit just your home page and then bounced. The lower the bounce rate the better you are doing at keeping visitors on your website. Which should help improve other site stats and keep readers coming back. So how does one lower a sites bounce rate? That’s something I’ve been trying to master myself with some success. Below are some tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years. Eye-Catching Headlines Write catchy headlines that will draw in your readers and get them to click and then read your post. You want to get them off your home page and reading the meat of your site. Don’t Give Away The Farm The home page shouldn’t have full articles or you risk the reader bouncing. Just give enough information to entice them to clicking on a post so they go further into your site. There are tons of WordPress themes set-up to display part of the article and then display a link to read more. Find Reliable Hosting Don’t give your visitors an excuse to leave by having a slow site. Look for reliable hosting and keep your site running at top speeds. Related Post Plug-ins are a great tool to help keep your site bounce rate down. Related Posts will find and display a list of similar post. Think of it as walking your readers through your website. Great SEO Bring the right kind of people to your website with optimized pages. If you page is optimized for your subject matter the less chances a new visitor will bounce. Check out the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin and optimize your site. Remember to fine tune as you go since search engine rankings are always changing. Please feel free to comment below or leave any suggestions you have.
Start tracking Website and Blog visitors with Google Analytics
Analyzing with Google Analytics – The Basics There are many ways to keep track of website statistics like unique visitors, user browser preferences, location and other valuable information. If you already have an account with Google it’s really simple to get started with Google Analytics. Provide information regarding your websites and then simply paste the tracking code into your site, have Google verify that the code is correct and the rest is done automatically. Best thing is that it’s free and has all the tools you need to discover the various trends of your website. Overview of your websites and blogs The opening screen is going to give you an overview of all your websites using Analytics which gives you a quick breakdown of current trends. Below you see some of my websites and what the trends are for the current week and comparing it with the previous week. You can also compare to the previous day, month and year depending on how long you’ve been analyzing your sites. Information at hand can be sorted by visits, average time on site, bounce rate, percent of change and website name. The information is valuable in knowing what kind of changes you might make on a site to keep visitors longer or where your traffic is coming from. By clicking on "View report" you’ll get that more detailed information such as the type of browser one is using to view your site or what state, city or even country they are visiting from. More Detailed Information Right after clicking on "View report" the Dashboard for your site stats gets displayed with more valuable information. By default the date range is the same as the main Overview page and now gives you a graphical display and breakdowns of key site stats. The first stat you see is the amount of visits for each day in the date range and below that are the site usage information, visitor overview, map layout, traffic sources overview and content overview. By clicking on the down arrow on the Visits tab you can change the type of stat you want displayed here. You can choose from Visits, Pageviews, Page/Visit, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate or the percentage of visits that are new. You can find description of each of these by visit http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics What to look for What kind of trends should you be looking for? Well that depends on what kind of goals you have in mind. If all you care about is getting visitors to your website then look for the Absolute Unique Visitors. But many of those visitors might have incorrectly made it to your site due to a bad search. The one trend I look at is the "Bounce Rate". The higher the bounce rate the more likely someone came to your site on accident such as bad search results. However if this number is low then chances are good search results got them to your site/landing page and they stayed and browsed. If they stay on your site then the next trend to check out would be "Average Time on Site" and "Pageviews". Those will give you a good indication of the quality of your website by showing you how long a visitor sticks around and how much stuff they checkout. It’s most important to have great content that’s relative to the visitor than just getting someone to visit your site. It’s also great when people are coming back to your site so it’s important to keep your content fresh and unique. Something noteworthy in the screen shot below is how many people are using Firefox, Safari and Chrome for their web browser. IE market share has been slipping and therefore it is important to keep this in mind when developing your website. I get frustrated when I can’t browse a site correctly when I’m using Firefox. Firefox is one of the most respected browsers in the industry and I’m going to assume that Chrome is going to gain market share quickly. What’s your browser of choice? 1-month view for one of my websites Stay tuned Next time we’ll take a look at some of the other aspects of Google Analytics and how you can use those to increase the type of visitors you are looking for. Resources: Google Analytic Product Tour Google Analytic App Gallery