I am.
I read a lot of them, but not nearly as many as I’d like to.
There’s lots of good information out there, and I’m sure it would help me in my daily work, but I’m too busy with my daily work to read the things.
I’m sure this is true for lots of other professionals in other organizations, which leads me to this odd thought.
If I was a CEO I think I’d find a young “idea guy” and hire him to do three things — and only three things.
- Read every white paper he can find that’s applicable to my business,
- Sit in on every meeting he can, and
- Keep a working “best practices” document on every functional area of the business.
I suspect that the increased efficiency would far more than pay his salary.
Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized
The last few days I’ve done some reading on bounce rates and spent some time in Google Analytics getting a feel for what’s what, and it seems that the best rule for bounce rates is that you’re doing well if your bounce rate is lower than it was last month.
Some articles will give you some fixed guidelines. For example, How to Fix a Leaky Web Site says under 25% is good, but over 40% is too high.
I don’t buy that because your bounce rate will depend on a whole lot of things that will vary from site to site. A blog has a completely different site architecture than a store that sells dishwasher parts, and different sites get different sorts of traffic.
Here are a few things to look at to get a sense of what’s going on with your site.
Look at your traffic sources and compare the bounce rates for each. (E.g., direct traffic, referring sites, and paid search vs. natural search.) Look at your top landing and top exit pages.
Do you see any patterns? Look at the pages with a low bounce rate and see how they differ from the pages with a high bounce rate. Do they attract different sorts of visitors? Is there a clear call to action, or some obvious next step on one page and not on the other?
Remember that a high bounce rate may simply be a sign of poorly qualified traffic. Your site may rank highly for a word that has several different meanings. (E.g., “cobra” can be a snake or a kind of mustang.)
I’ve set up some “advanced segments” in Google Analytics that let me track how many people stay for one page view, or two, or three or more. I then run a report on my top search terms and see what percentage of my traffic falls into those three groups. Good pages not only have a low bounce rate, but they have a high “time on site” and a high percentage of people in the “3 or more” category.
Greg Krehbiel Analytics
I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine from SIPA.
Harry had read a statistic that people are spending less and less time on newspaper sites. (I don’t know if this is what he’d read, but along those lines see Average Time Spent on Top 30 Newspaper Web Sites Declines — More Than Half Fall)
Harry thinks that time on the site is more important than the number of visitors, and I think he’s probably right. We talked about it for a while, and then I came up with the following.
Every website has a purpose, and webmasters ought to have clear goals for their sites. Your average SIPA-member website will probably have goals something like this.
- Get a visitor in the first place
- Get the visitor to a second page (i.e., not bounce)
- Get the visitor to return
- Sign up / register in some way (e-mail newsletter, forum, whatever)
- Buy something (probably something small)
- Buy something else (up- or cross-sell)
Goals 3 through 6 should be cross-referenced to the time the user spends on the site. IOW, of the people who spent more than X minutes on the site, how many returned, signed up or bought something?
If those stats bear out what both Harry and I expect they do (that people who spend more time on the site are more likely to complete site goals), then a good strategy would be …
- Find the pages that people spend the most time on,
- Make more of that type of page, and
- Make sure those pages are optimized towards your site goals.
Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized