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In the internet marketing industry, there are two fundamental items that traditionally create online success. The first is bringing in as many visitors as possible to your site and the second is ensuring that your website turns the largest number of visitors into customers.
I have created this post to help you identify ways to improve your content using Google Analytics.
Find Poor Performing Content
A quick and easy way of understanding how your content is performing is looking at whether your landing pages cause visitors to “engage” rather than “bounce” to another site. Lets create a quick and easy report to show pages that need attention:
Click on “CONTENT : TOP LANDING PAGES” then sort by “BOUNCE RATE”
As we can see, there are a large number of single pages and we should filter these out because they take away from more significant data.
To filter these go to the bottom of the report and add an Exclusion filter for ENTRANCES greater than (say) 10.
What we see in this report is all pages that have been viewed 10 times or more and sorted by bounce rate. It is always a good habit to use more than one metric to draw conclusions from. So take a peek at the pages with the highest bounce rates and lowest average time on page.
Tips to Improve Bounce Rate
Once you have determined pages viewed most by highest bounce rate you can then examine the poorest performing pages.
Here are some key items to consider when improving bounce rate.
1) Is there too much text?
Keep your message on each page punchy and clear. Customer conversion is not about bombarding a visitor with too much information. Provide it in the right format and amount. Visitors love bullet points!
2) Do you have a clear call to action?
Your site design should incorporate a clear path to conversion. We call this a Sales Funnel and it all begins with leading your website visitors in the first step in the right direction. Make it easy for your visitor.
3) Is the page visually appealing?
A high quality design that is conversion focused makes all the difference. There is no excuse for poor quality web design these days, heavens knows the number of web developers out there! If your website looks like a friend of the family designed it…. then more than likely your visitors will have the same impression about your level of professionalism
My advice is to spend the money and make sure that your development company understands search engine marketing and especially conversion.
4) Web Designers Should Leave Their Creativity At The Door
For web designers – leave your creativity at the door. I commonly see web designers over design things which actually distract from the core marketing message that the site is trying to communicate.
5) Does the page clearly show what visitors are searching for?
Check the keywords that the visitor searched for that caused them to land on each web page and make sure that your content reflects what they are searched for.
Visitors are bouncing for two reasons; Either they have come to a page that doesn’t accurately reflect what they are trying to find (we can't do too much about this – except adjust any paid advertising keywords or ad copy) or they have come to the right page and they have not found what they are looking for or been engaged enough to go further into your site!
Summary
Within a few minutes you should now understand how to find poor performing pages and learned how to decide whether the page itself is engaging. Now you need to identify a couple of things to improve and monitor the results. It should be a cyclical process!
To take this one stage further we suggest using Google Website Optimizer to test out the changes you make! This tool will tell you the exact improvement that a new variation of your content can provide.
Google Website Optimizer is a service we include in our WyseLabs product! Feel free to ask us for more details.
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3 Responses to “Improving Content & Bounce Rate With Google Analytics”
Very precisely said Jon. A good balance between the design, the call to action and the message strikes the right chord.
February 22nd, 2010 at 1:45 am
Really an eye opener and at the same time an educative post. I am always interested to read your analytics post Jon. Every time it makes me learn something new about analytics and its untapped areas.
February 23rd, 2010 at 7:12 am
This is an excellent post as bounce rate is a vital metric in natural search as well as paid. Planning to follow these tips to increase my visitors stay in my website.
March 5th, 2010 at 6:31 am