Digital Pacific Company Blog

You may have plenty of great information on your website, but if people are not sticking around to read it, then what use is it really? Think about how many times you do a Google search and find yourself clicking around multiple websites until you find one that draws your attention further… and keeps you reading on. Make sure your website is the one that web users want to click through by lowering your bounce rate.

As mentioned in the previous article on using Google Analytics for traffic analysis, bounce rate is the rate at which visitors to your site enter and exit to external sites without clicking through to other internal pages. Obviously, if users exit, they are probably not reading the amazing content you have placed on the web. Take a look at the following tips to evaluate if your bounce rate can easily be improved.

Decrease page load time. People are impatient and busy, so if a site’s information takes ages to load they will just try and find it somewhere else. Although there many places to look at when decreasing page load time, such as those mentioned in the article 15 Quick Way s to Shrink Page Load Times, an easy one to address is image size.

• Image Size: High quality images will take longer to load. You can use certain programs to decrease image size, such as with the “Save for Web” option available in Photoshop and Illustrator. Within this option, you can choose the quality of output desired in conjunction with file size. Also, it is important to note that just specifying an image’s width and height when placing it on a site (i.e. width=”350” height=”300”) will help a browser move on to loading other images and page contents while the image still processes in the background.

Include eye-catching information above the fold. “Above the fold” refers to the part of a website that web users will see without having to scroll down. Most users do not scroll when entering a home page of a site, so making a plan to put the most important and eye-catching information above the fold will help create intrigue and reason for sticking around. When making this plan, it may be important to keep in mind the end-user’s screen resolution. Of course, the amount of information present on a screen will be much less at a lower resolution of 640X480 than it would at a resolution of 1280X1024.

Make titles and headlines descriptive, yet easy to read. Imagine being a new visitor to a website looking for specific or helpful information. What do you look for? More than likely, you will probably take a quick glance at all the titles and headlines to see if it is worth pausing your web surfing for a few minutes. Try to include keywords in your titles and use simpler English. Also, avoid using too many abbreviations that might make the web user think more in the process. For example, instead of saying, “500GB ext. HD for More Dowloads,” try saying, “Increase Downloads with an External Hard Drive.” The latter is much easier to read and understand in a quick manner by more people.

Try to exclude external links from above the fold. If the web user sees a link to an external site upon immediate entry, they may click on that link, thus increasing your bounce rate. Do everyone a favour and put quality content on your site that you can promote on the homepage above the fold so your site visitors will actually continue on with your site, and not the site of someone else. If you do want to showcase the information of someone else’s website, try and do so in a way that keeps readers on your site for longer.

By attempting to make small changes in relation to the above topics, you could very easily see your bounce rates fall. Of course, the bounce rate will not tell all about a website, but it is definitely a topic to keep in mind when using the entire Google Analytics tool.

Wondering where your site visitors are coming from? Are they sticking around long enough to read the new content you just added? What keywords are being searched to find your site in the first place? If you find yourself asking any of these questions, then an easy way to have them all answered is to sign up for Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an online tool that helps to track website statistics including the following: Visits, Page Views, Bounce Rates, Length of Visit, Keywords Searched, Countries, and more.

How do I sign up for Google Analytics?

Signing up is quick and easy. All it takes is an existing Gmail account, which can be set up for free if needed. After getting logged in to your Gmail account, navigate to the Google products page and select the Analytics option.

There you can create an account for your specific website to be tracked, but be sure to complete the last step of installing the tracking code on your site. Google Analytics will provide a string of code that you will need to place on each page you want tracked just before the </body> tag.

How much does Google Analytics cost?

Like the many other Google products, Google provides its Analytics to the public for free!

What exactly can I do with Analytics?

The possibilities seem almost endless with Google Analytics, so we will just take the time to outline a few key functions.

• Tracking changes over time. Obviously, if you are tracking your site, you are also looking for improvement. Even though the numbers tell all, seeing the change visually makes it that much better. Google Analytics provides a huge graph at the top of the page that shows just that, making it easy to see with the eye alone how you are doing. Furthermore, use the information in Analytics to run reports that compare directly to periods of time in the past.

• Track keywords. You might be surprised how certain visitors are actually finding your website. With Google Analytics, see a detailed rundown of all the keywords that have been searched to find your site and get even more by being able to track the number of visits, time of visits, and even bounce rates (i.e. the rate at which visitors enter and exit the same page without clicking through) caused by each.

 

• See your referring sites. As with the keyword tracking, you can see which websites sent visitors to your website and get a rundown of the number of visits, length of visit, and bounce rates for each.

 

• See the geolocation visualization of your visitors. Get a map view of what country your visitors are coming from. This may help give ideas of how to customise your site in respect to the varying markets around the world.

 

• Set up and track goal pages. Goal pages are those pages you want a visitor to reach. For example, if you are selling a product, then of course you want each customer to see the purchase confirmation page meaning they just made an online order. Goal pages can also include registration completed pages and software download complete pages. After the goal pages are set in Analytics, you can actually track the paths, or funnels, with this tool.

What are you waiting for?

Both free and powerful, Google Analytics provides a tool useful to any web endeavour looking to get a clearer picture of their site traffic. To see more information on this web tool, take a look at the Google Analytics site. For more detailed information on its benefits, be sure to read the Case Studies.