So you have a website and are getting visitors, but there are no sales that show proof of the website doing what it is supposed to do. There may be some help for you in the way you analyze your visitor traffic to find out what pages people are visiting and leaving on. Once you have the data you can then focus on experimenting to keep people on those pages. Follow along with us as we take you through analyzing your website pages.
When it comes to business websites, one of the most important tools that you can use is a website stats tool. We recommend using Google analytics for its ability to drill down on your web pages with ease. These reports will give you information about when traffic is coming to your website, what pages they visited, how long they were on your website, what website they came from (or if it was from search results), and most importantly what page they left from.
Your Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is a reflection of how many people came to a page on your website and left your site without looking at any other pages. This stat should not be confused with your exit rate. Basically a "bounce" happens when a person either comes to a page on your website via your direct URL, search engine results, or from another website and then leaves directly without clicking into another page.
It is good to keep an eye on your bounce rate for each page on your website. High bounce rates give you valuable information about how people see your website. If you have a high bounce rate for a particular web page, (I would say more than 20%) you should probably take a look at that page. Look at the web page not as the website owner but a user. Here are some things to think about:
- Is the page easy to navigate through?
- Does the content captivate the user?
- Are there to many links on the page? This could potentially scare a user.
- what are you doing on that page to get people to follow through to other pages?
If you look at the page as a user and see flaws in there that may be cause for a person to leave the page, revamp the page and start over. Think of it this way, if the page already has a high bounce rate, experiment with the page and see what works. I would give the page that you revamped about a week or two of getting traffic to give good data.
Your Exit Rate
Your exit rate is similar to your bounce rate, however, the user has come the specific page from another page in your site and then exited out. Like your bonce rate, you can use this data to make your web pages better, and potentially turn those out into sales.
Time Spent on your web page
Another feature of your website stats should give you data on how long the user was on your website and even on a certain page. This is another feature that gives you an big indication of whether or not your website content is capturing the user and keeping them in your website. Chances are, if a person is only on a page for 15 seconds or so, they really did not even read anything on that page. There are some factors that cause this data to not be as accurate as we would all like. For example, if a user comes to your site and knows where they are going on the site, then they are only on a certain page for a second or two before they are clicking to the next page. Which is good because they are clicking to the next page.
The signs to watch for
What you will want to watch for is a page that has a low time on page average, high bounce rate, and a high exit rate. This is telling you there is something wrong with this page and it needs to be fixed ASAP.
We hope that you find this article useful, and utilize it to better your business website traffic and overall conversion from user to client. If you have further questions on how to use your website stats to better your website, please feel free to contact us for help.