Category: Web Design

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Your Bounce Rate on Google Analytics

This past month if you are sharing your website statistical data with Google Analytics, they emailed you a very interesting aggregate report on bounce rates. Here is an executive snapshot:

 

Traffic Sources

Pages / Visit

Bounce Rate

Avg Time on Site
Direct 4.0
(-0.5)		 47.2%
(-4.0%)		 5:21
(-0:07)
Referral 5.0
(+0.1)		 43.1%
(-1.1%)		 6:36
(-1:48)
Organic
Search		 4.9
(-0.1)		 47.9%
(-1.1%)		 4:43
(+0:06)
CPC
Search		 5.6
(+0.0)		 41.4
(-1.7%)		 3:57(+0:07)

What is very interesting is the industry average of typical bounce rates in the report. If your site has a bounce rate higher than these, it is definitely time to review your website content or at least evaluate if you may have a potential problem to address.

Another interesting trend noted was the time on a typical website and bounce rate has decreased for websites on the average this past year.

“Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.”

11/1/09 – 2/1/10

11/1/10 – 2/1/11

Difference
Pages/Visit 4.9 4.5 -0.4
Bounce
Rate		 48.2% 47.0% -1.2%
Avg
Time on Site		 5:49 5:23 -0:26

If your site is not stacking up to these global aggregate averages it may be time to adjust your message, review the informational value that you provide to readers, and change your focus of being self centric to user centric in your content. In some cases you may have a high bounce rate that you do not need to be concerned with based on the pages involved. For example, I have some informational white papers on my website that have high bounce rates. These pages are really built to generate links and draw in traffic. The people that come to visit may never be interested in my services, but I still like having the information and helpful content there for readers for a big picture.

Some of you may be asking why should I care about bounce rate?

Well first the bounce rate is the percentage of readers that hit your page and then surf off immediately; meaning they did not find what they were looking for on your website. If you have a high bounce rate for cost per click advertising it means keywords need to be immediately reviewed and some potentially dropped. If you are not using pay per click but rather your bounce rate is high for organic searches it may be that you should rework content with new keywords that are more specific to the services that you are offering instead of general terms. Check first to see what pages are involved first don’t just start changing things.

What I personally found interesting was that we finally have some benchmarks to compare sites to for evaluation of health as industry averages. I am going to check out my website stats right now to see how I personally stack up, how about you?

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Keeping Your Website Clean

Some people get so absorbed in spending time driving traffic to their site that they forget about the functionality of the site itself. In order to ensure the maximum amount of possible conversions from your Internet marketing efforts, your site needs to have completely usable functions and features.

Sites that are loaded with broken links, calls to action that result in 404 errors and contact e-mail addresses that return messages undelivered are not going to do very well in terms of conversions. Even if you double the incoming traffic to your website, your conversions will still suffer if your website isn’t functional.

It’s important to regularly examine your site in order to be sure that everything is functioning exactly as you would want it to if you were a prospective customer visiting for the first time. Make sure all of your links, calls to action and landing pages are functioning properly. Take the time to fill out and test the contact form to ensure that the message actually gets delivered to the intended person. If any of these aspects of your website aren’t working properly, make it a point to fix them, or have them fixed immediately.

Any prospect that ends up on your website for any reason isn’t very likely to place an order on a site that isn’t functioning properly. You can also forget about first time visitors becoming regulars or directing their friends to websites that don’t function properly.

For every day that an integral aspect of your site isn’t functioning, you are losing sales. It doesn’t matter how much work you put into your Internet marketing efforts if your prospects can’t take the next step do to a poorly functioning site. We carefully monitor and test all contact forms and work hard to improve our user’s experience.

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Contact Form Woes And The Solution

Occasionally we have a client who is using a low-end web host or who is self-hosting and does not have a cgi-bin or scripting enabled in order for us to install a contact form processing script. Sometimes this has lead to expensive programming charges. We do not offer programming and so we have to contract out this portion of a project adding to expenses.

We have found a service that will process the script for you on their servers and so far it looks like a clean and elegant solution to a thorny problem for some clients. Our preferred site is MyContactForm.com. With a premium account for $24.99 per year, now any client can have a professional seamless contact form installed on their site without complex programming initiatives. I think that it is a very smart solution.

We have used this service on a number of client sites over the years and have had no issues in implementation or script processing. If you are in a similar situation, it is worth a look-see.

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When Was the Last Time You Redesigned Your Website?

I am often asked to perform code optimization services on websites in an effort to improve organic search placement. One of our determining factors of if we will consider a project as a good match for us, is how recently the site had been created. If your website is three, four, or five years old, it is by far better to invest in a website redesign with a firm that focuses on organic placement than it is to try to put an SEO band-aid on an old website.

Content creation and optimization services are not inexpensive. It is not unusual for a 15 page website to cost over $2,500 to optimize plus including new website pages and content as part of the process. However if the website looks dated, is not using new technology, or is not built with reader and search engine friendly code, we will typically not take on the project as it is not providing good service to the client in the long run.

The look and feel of websites have changed over time and it is important that your website have a contemporary feel. Content is one of the most important factors in getting organic placement. If your website has very little content and has a website design that does not allow site growth (both in the navigation and amount of content on the page), the money that would have been earmarked for code optimization should be saved for redesign and new content creation.

Be smart about how you spend your money especially when it comes to your website.