How-to Look at Your Bounce Rate with Google Analytics
Blogging – Sail the 7 C’s to Better Blogging: C #6 – Check and Adjust
Today’s post is about How To Look at Your Bounce Rate using Google Analytics.
In an earlier post, “Sail the 7 Cs of Blogging”, I gave an overview of seven different aspects of blogging. I’m going to repeat the introduction from yesterday for those who came in late. 🙂
HOW-TO – We are taking a quick look at our real Traffic – Something YOU SHOULD DO!
This post is part of a series of three posts on Site Statistics (it started as one and kinda grew My material tends to do that 🙂 ). Here we are taking a look at where we ARE so we can see if we IMPROVE.
Overview of the 7 C’s to Better Blogging Series
- C#1 – Find your CORE (Your Niche and Your USP)
- C#2- Blog Consistently – widely recognized as THE most important element.
- C#3- Be Congruent
- C#4 – Content is King
- C#5 – Have at least one Call to Action
- C#6 – Check and Adjust – Actually look at what is going on. Looking is what this post is about. Yesterday we took a look at your blog traffic with Google Analytics and the day before we looked at JetPack Site Stats
- C#7 – Connect with your Audience – see the next paragraph
Connecting with your Audience – Creating blog traffic has four distinct phases –
- Things you do before you start posting in your blog – covered in a post about Phase 1,
- Things you do while you are writing a post (SEO and HOC) – covered in a post about Phase 2,
- Things you do after you write a post and press Publish Blog Traffic After Publish 1, What The Expert Bloggers Do, Notes From the Research and My Original Traffic System.
- Check and And Adjust – Look at what is actually happening to your traffic and adjust your thinking. I posted at look at my starting traffic a while back. This is an example of a way to look at your traffic.
Caveat – there are lots of opinions and lots of research on this topic. I’m giving you the best that I know. Parts of it will probably be out of date before it is even published.
Why Should You Look (Yes I said this Yesterday, but it is important)
I can hear my techno-toddler friends asking now “Why should I look at this? I don’t know enough about this stuff to make any sense of it! At this point I’ll suggest that it is worth everyone talking a look at your blog traffic for one reason. There will be things in there that surprise you. Those thing are vitally important. Knowing them will shape your future decisions. For example, I was surprised that second city by number of hits on my site was London. I suspect I know why, but it did surprise me. I was also surprised to see more Chrome users than any other browser. You expect some more surprises when you look at your bounce rate.
NOTE: I spent a long time as a professional researcher. Data is questionnaires in a cardboard box or “available” in Google Analytics and never looked at. Information is data processed and presented so your can make decisions on it. The information is there just crying for us to use it to improve our craft.
This is going to a be what is usually called a Quick and Dirty – I’m going to use my current blog as an example and I’m NOT going to go deep.
I feel a little funny exposing the fact that my blog does not get NEAR the traffic that I would like, but I figure the only way to get other people who are new to blogging to engage is to show them information they can relate to. i hope this encourages you to Look At YOUR Bounce Rate.
Look At Your Blog Traffic Bounce Rate with Google Analytics
Here is one of Google’s experts talking about why your should look at your bounce rate. He really believes in it and so do I.
Here is a quote from a PC WORLD article: “Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist, calls the bounce rate ‘the sexiest metric ever. It helps you ask the right questions. It will help you quickly distill down where things are not going right.'”
A Quick Look at Your Bounce Rate
Yesterday we looked Google Analytics. Today we are going to look at just one aspect of Google Analytics. Once you open Google Analytics (Google for it, it uses your Gmail account and password), go down to Content –> All Pages. Just like you see on the right. This will take you down to where you can look at your bounce rate.
I will note that your overall site bounce rate is kind of interesting, but it can hide a multitude of sins! We need to drill down to the details.
If You Are Advertising – Be Careful
NOTE: If you are advertising and sending visitors to Squeeze pages on your blog site, these numbers need to be looked at very carefully since they include the visits by people responding to the ads.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
Opinions vary. Kaushik indicated 40 to 60% is okay. Others try for 20% to 30%.
Scroll Down and You Will See Some Interesting Areas
Part of this is interesting since it forms a base line. Six months or a year from now when I look at the same screen, some decisions can be made based on the changes.
I was interested in the number of repeat visitors and the length of time on the site. I think three and a half minutes is pretty good as an average. It was interesting to note the little graph beside the bounce rate (bounce rate = % of people who leave immediately. I believe it is 10 seconds here.) The bounce rate jumped way up when I started advertising. This is to be expected. When people click on an article based on its name, there is a good chance that they will at least scan it. When they click on an ad, they can usually see very quickly if they want to take action or not.
View of the Pages
Let’s look at these pages.
1. Thank-you-webinar-invite – This is a Landing page where paid ads are being sent. Looking at how many people have landed here and how many people signed up, I know I have some work to do. This is critical information. It is no longer jst raw data, it is actual information that I can make decisions on.
2. The second most popular page is my home page. I talked in the previous posts about how this is largely a result of commenting on other people’s blog sites and using my home page as the value to fill in where it asks for “WEBSITE.” Now I enter the URL for the current post (or one that is relative to the article). The only time I don’t do that is when I see that the blog is using a plugin called CommentLuv. If they are, they are already creating a link to my most current post (or one that I pick from the most recent 10 posts I wrote and published. Still I need to make sure my HOME page sparkles.
3. the 75% bounce rate for the second Thank You page says I’m going to need to go take a serious look at that.
4. The 0% bounce rate on the Overwhelm article is good confirmation that this page met a need.
I can make a couple of guesses about other things on this page, but nothing else really jumps out at me.
Note about Split Testing
I use a plugin called Pretty Link. The plugin allows me to create a link that is easy to type and remember (i.e. http://HalePringle.com/yt/ ) If a user browses to this link they are redirected to a longer link, for example the “yt” might actually be something like “youtube-invitation-video-draft-1”. The Pro version of Pretty Link (about $30) allows you to have multiple pages served by the same show URL code. It will swap between them evenly. You could then look at your bounce rate for each page to see if one was loosing people quickly and the other was not.
See It’s Easy
I think you can see – You SHOULD Look At Your Bounce Rate
Until next time, you have a Great Day!
↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below. ↓ ↓
Hale Pringle – Hale Yes!
Skype hale.pringle
Email: HaleYes@HalePringle.com
P.S. If you are working to move your business online and it all seems overwhelming, I can help! Take a look at http://HalePringle.com, or sign up for the free coaching call. You can email me or give me a Skype call. I’ll give you the benefit of my years of experience and many thousands of dollars in training and searching the rabbit hole called Internet Marketing and Network Marketing. I can help you with Lead Generation, the feeling of overwhelm, blogging, and even career change. Add that to the finest mentoring on the Internet (Ann Sieg’s Team and Inner Circle) and you have a Winner!
That was a lot of information. A little information overload. I will never look at bounce rates the same.
Brett Dupree recently posted..Doing What Serves Me
Darn, I tried to keep it simple, honest I did 🙂
All I ask is that people take a quick look. A page that nobody stays on more at least 10 seconds deserves another look on our end. We’ve done something wrong.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Thank you for this! I knew what a bounce rate was but you brought a whole other level of depth to help me analyze my content. Thank you!
Cindy Schulson recently posted..Will The Real You Please Stand Up
You are most welcome Cindy,
Sometimes a quick look will tell you very interesting things. For example I had no idea that people in China, Russia and India were reading me.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Great insight for a newbie like me. I had no idea what the numbers meant or why I should pay attention. Thank you Hale for always giving great advice and amazing help to everyone!
I hope I’m reading right and that you are saying that the number might mean a little more now 🙂
For me just looking says things. For example the City. Number 1 is my city, number 2 is unknown and number 3 is London. London? I don’t know what is up with that, but I will be certainly on the look out now that I know.
Thanks for commenting?
Dr. Hale
Thanks for this information, Hale. Some of it made my eyes glaze, but what I could absorb was very helpful
Sorry for the overload Francene,
Google Analytics is enough to make anyone’s eyes glaze. For me the important thing is 1) You should be hooked up. As you grow that data become invaluable and 2) just wandering around the tables will tell you things. Some of them very interesting things.
Regards,
Hale
Thanks Hale for a wonderful informative post it will certainly make me look at things in a different light.
Thank you Linda,
I always hope that I can provide something useful.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Thanks Hale for the information. I will definitely pay more attention to the bounce rate as well as other metrics.
sherman smith recently posted..How Can A Facebook Fan Page Help Your Home Business?
YOu are welcome Sherman,
I’ve made a resolution to take a look at my Google Anaalytics regularly. There really is some good info in there.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Link exchange is nothing else except it is just placing the other person’s web site link on your page at suitable place and other person will also do same in favor of you.
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this useful info with us. Please keep us informed like this.
Thank you for sharing.
Kami recently posted..Kami
You are most welcome Kami, I’m glad it was useful to you.
Dr. Hale
Hi there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have
any problems with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing many months of hard
work due to no back up. Do you have any solutions to prevent hackers?
Isobel recently posted..Isobel
I have some fairly strong security plugins operating. They don’t guarantee that hackers can’t get to me (they can), but it reduces the risk dramatically. Mainly removing the “admin” user account and make sure that you can’t try to log in more than 3 times during a 20 minute span. That really slows down the brute force robots.
Regards,
Hale
Having read this I believed it was very informative.
I appreciate you finding the time and energy to put this content together.
I once again find myself spending a significant amount of time both reading and commenting.
But so what, it was still worthwhile!
Diet System For Women recently posted..Diet System For Women
Kern,
I’m glad it helped.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Hey are using WordPress for your blog platform? I’m new to the bog world but I’m
trying to get started and create mmy own. Do you require any html coding expertise to make your
own blog? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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