Google Analytics - Webstats and Google Analytics

Is your website stinking the place out?

Your website looks great and you’ve spent a lot of money on design and programming to produce something that is going to make you top dog in your niche – how do you know if it’s any good or not?

 

In google analytics the base indicator for being able to tell how good or bad a website is at dealing with it’s traffic is the bounce rate.

 

Aha!

If you only own one site then you don’t have a clue what you should be measuring against and won’t have any idea whether your bounce rate is good or bad no matter how high or low the actual figure is, so I’m going to help you out with some actual site data so that you can come to an educated conclusion.

 

As with all statistics there can be mis truths and lies buried in the data so you need to know what you are looking for and most importantly what you are measuring against. After all just taking the bounce rate as an isolated figure is no good to you at all for determining anything of meaningful value and you need data to compare against to see how you are measuring up.

 

Bounce rate is defined by different tools in different ways so if you are using something other than google analytics it would be wise to check out how that specific tool is measuring bounce rate. Google analytics measures it as the amount of visitors who leave your site after reading just one page and then vanishing but different tools could also factor in other values like the amount of time the surfer spends on that one page before disappearing into the ether. For this article we are going to use google analytics as our bounce rate monitor and go with their definition of what it actually is which is the number of visitors who visit just one page and then leave your site.

In effect this is the “stickiness” indicator of your site and a measure of how good your site is at capturing the interest of your visitors.

Bounce rate is expressed as a percentage with 0% being the ultimate (never achievable) goal and 100% meaning you have a right stinker on your hands and lots of work to do to turn it around but before we start looking at the hard data we need a preamble so that we know what we are actually measuring and stop us from deducing duff information from the figures.

 

A high bounce rate does not necessarily mean that your business system is going to fail. If you are selling high ticket items then you may get a high bounce rate because people are put off by the price once they see it and decide to look elsewhere. However for the fewer sales you do make you could be making a far higher margin and so the high BR does not affect your site performance.

 

In addition to this high bounce rates are to be welcomed when you are starting out with a fresh pay per click campaign as you can quickly eliminate the keywords that are not working for you. In this case it’s the keywords that are causing the high bounce rate and not the site so there’s no need to slit your throat after just a couple of days testing a new PPC campaign.

 

So generally what are acceptable levels of “bounce”.

 

For the first example I’m going to take this site you are currently reading which I’ve had for about ten years and done very little with it. It’s had a couple of makeovers through the years but it’s only today that I decided to take the site seriously and build it properly. I’ve built quite a few sites over the years and have no need to build anymore so it makes sense to pass on my knowledge and build this site into the resource that I’d really like it to be.

 

 

 

Yuck. This stinks.

 

A bounce rate of 80% means that there is nothing of any real value here for people to see and so eight or nine people out of ten are going to turn around and head right out of here. That’s depressing and if your bounce rate chart looks anything like this then you should do the honourable thing and fall on your sword. The only reason I’m not going to do that is because I know I can turn the figures around over the coming months and years.

 

This sort of chart means that there is something desperately wrong with your offering and/or your content. You have lots of work in front of you to turn this sickly offering into a winner. This one is on life support and needs a major injection of fresh material to breathe any life into it!

 

When you look at stats like these you can instantly tell how bad it is. You need to fix the site before you do anything else because you will need ten times the traffic to make a profit on whatever it is you are peddling.

 

Now let’s take a look at a site that I have lavished care and attention on since April this year. I’m a keen poker player and there is money to be made in that industry so I decided to build my first poker affiliate site. It’s only six months old and it’s targeting a very direct niche:

 

 

 

This is more like it.

 

In fact this is exceptionally good and it means people are finding the information they need when they hit the site. A 40% average is pretty damn good and this site is going to be a winner.

 

These two examples are pretty much the high and low extremes. If you are hitting the scale at 80% or so then you are looking at a dog of a site that needs a lot of work to rectify. If you are at 35% then you are in the elite marketing class and deserve congratulations for all of your hard work.

 

In between this is where most people will sit with 50-60% being a very workable site.

 

So why does bounce rate matter so much? I’m making money, what’s the big deal?

 

The answer to this is easy – it’s the money you are leaving on the table that is hurting you. You don’t see it because you didn’t have it in the first place, but you should have it in your bank account, after all the cost of marketing to people who are not enthused by your site is the same whether or not they like what they see.

 

Except of course when it comes to pay per click.

 

Now you are talking lots of money to be made or lost.

 

If you are bouncing too high then your pay per click costs are going to be much higher than someone with the same offering who spent a bit more time on their site and took a little more care over it’s creation. In the case of affiliate marketing this could make or break you.

 

This is why it is important to look at your statistical figures properly. Those webstats or awstats that you get free with your webhosting are absolutely useless for determining how well a site is performing. They may show a nice pretty graph with the traffic appearing to rise month on month but you know what – nearly all of that increase in the majority of cases will be new spiders and robots crawling your site. They won’t be the lifeblood of your business which is the new unique visitor. You just can’t tell that by looking at these types of stats package.

 

Bounce rate is the simplest of all the metrics available to look at and the easiest to understand. Depending on where you sit on the scale should give you a good idea of how much work you need to do on your site to make it successful. Doing big link gaining exercises or writing lots of articles to gain link backs is going to be time wasted if you don’t get your presentation right so it’s worthwhile fixing that before you do anything else.