Tips for Website Success

Author: Arjun Thomas
Filed under: Social Media

Friday
Feb 20,2009

I came across another interesting article on the Google Blog that allows you to harness the power of Google Analytics.

Would you believe me if I said you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand your website data? No? Believe it. Free tools like Google Analytics can help simplify website data so that you can better understand what visitors are doing when they arrive on your site.

One of the coolest innovations in understanding your website has been to provide delightful metrics on your web data so that you can make direct changes to your site. In lesson one of our series on The Power of Measurement, we will learn about bounce rate and how understanding it can improve your website.

You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a “hit” meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed). Today, you will find that each web page gets many “hits,” rendering the metric meaningless. While the number of “hits” a page received used to be the best measure of success, we now have more in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the performance of our web pages.

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

Bounce rate has these attributes:
1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.