Today we’re going to look at a report that is guaranteed to show you something that you can change to improve your website’s performance. Why is this so hard? Well, the trick with web analytics is to find the report that tells you what to do: the internet throws off more data than any other medium in history, and as a result we are drowning in non-useful, non-actionable data.
Here are some typical web reports from typical web analytics tools:
I struggled with reports like these for years. What does it mean if unique visitors (the number of people that visited your site, regardless of how many times they came back) are up this month? Is that good? What if unique visitors are up because you had a link to your site posted on a random MySpace website? Average time on the site is up. Is that good? Do we want people to stay longer? Or does that just mean that a bunch of people fell asleep at their desk while looking at your site?
Well, the answer is that we don’t really care about reports like these. They give us aggregate data for the site as a whole, which makes it very hard to draw useful conclusions about the many different groups that come to our website, and they use behavioral data that doesn’t get us very close to how we actually make money from our websites.
Below is a report from Google Analytics, a free analytics tool that we recommend to all of our clients. While this is a great tool that allows you to get beyond the basic behavioral reports that most tools focus on (visits, time on site, page views, etc.), it can be hard to find the useful reports in a tool that lets you view your data in thousands of different ways. Take a look at this and compare it to the reports above:
What’s the first thing that you notice? I’m guessing that you see that we are comparing different things on the site (pages, entry pages, search key phrases, etc.) to each other. Every one of these pages is being compared to the site average, and the pages that are performing worse than the site average need to be fixed. My two favorite metrics for these two are bounce rates and conversion rates. Pick the pages that are not performing, brainstorm about why they are struggling, and fix them: these are the proverbial low-hanging fruit.
If you are curious about how to generate this report, go to traffic sources->keywords (search keywords) or content->top content (specific pages), and select the icon on the far right above the data:
Now select Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate from the second drop down and go pick your low-lying fruit!
