A “bounce” occurs when a web site visitor enters a particular page and then leaves the site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. 

In actuality, the bounce rate can be quite arbitrary depending on the website. For some, a bounce rate of 44% is quite high. I have a client who sells modular homes and she has a bounce rate of about 15%. If she goes up to 20%, she starts panicking.  

Another client who sells recycling containers once gave me a bonus when I got his bounce rate under 50%. It was previously about 65% and I saved him about $550/month.  

Still another client, a dryer vent cleaning specialist for whom I’m just doing SEO work, has a bounce rate of about 65%. Here’s the reason: he’s a local business whose site is so well optimized, it comes up for searches all over the country. When they see that he only does business in Hampton Roads, they leave. His bounce rate for local traffic is much lower. 

However, my colleague has a client who is experiencing a 44% bounce rate with a local news site and is concerned that this number is not good for advertisers.  

This probably is true, but the website analytics would have to be analyzed to know for sure. It could be that most visitors are clicking on a story they Googled and then left after reading it. A high bounce rate on Google referrals would confirm that. For my colleague, a close look at page popularity could actually reveal an opportunity to convince advertisers to invest more advertising on the top 5 pages–prime real estate if the pages are getting lots of traffic. 

The key is website conversions.  If the site is converting a fair portion of its traffic, a high bounce rate is less important.  It’s even less important if those conversions are turning into high revenue.  For example, if a real estate agent is spending $1000 per month on paid search marketing and turning that into $30,000 in profit, a bounce rate of 60% is irrelevant. 

The best approach is to look at it holistically.  Baseline the bounce rate, analyze the data, set a goal, and work to lower it.  Your site analytics will reveal many important factors that will tell you where you are wasting money or where you are missing the target.

Web Analytics

Web analytics measures website visitor’s behaviors when arriving to your website. This information measures the performance of your site so that you can use it to improve upon key factors to increase responses and determine future marketing campaigns.

Technology

Both Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics use page tagging which is a small invisible image through JavaScript. With this it passes along image requests as well information about the pages and the visitor itself. The service assigns a cookie to the user which identifies them for each and every visit.

JavaScript automatically runs every time the page is loaded. Additional information can easily be added to JavaScript. Page tagging can report on interaction such as clicks, how someone uses Flash movies and MouseOver.

How this is all implemented is by a hidden snippet of JavaScript code that the user adds to every page of their website. This code collects the data and sends it back to the data collection server for processing. With Google the processing takes place hourly. They do note that it can take up to three to four hours of time. Yahoo processing is within minutes.

Google Analytics:

The Internal Site Search This show how many visitors search your site, what they looked for, and where they end up.

Benchmarking This shows your site usage metrics and whether they underperformed or outperformed those of your industry vertical.

Trend and Date Slider You need to compare the time periods and select date ranges to not lose sight of your long term trends. This tool is for just that.

Ecommerce Tracking Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords. You can also identify your revenue sources.

Funnel Visualization Find out which pages result in lost conversions.

Site Overlay With this tool you can see traffic and conversion information for each and every link.

Email reports You can schedule personalized report emails that contain the information that you want to share.

GeoTargeting Find out where your visitors come from and find where your most productive geographic markets are.

AdWords Integration You can also buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business.

Yahoo Analytics:

Executive Dashboards With these you can View key performance metrics within customizable executive dashboards and set goals. Then you can track your progress and meet specific needs.

Custom Reports You tailor your reports with the Custom Report Wizard. With these you can add categories for customs fields.

Advanced Campaign Management Management to track and optimize your marketing campaigns regarding CPC, CPM, CPA and your ROI. You can also organize your reports and analyze your campaign results.

Real-Time Segmentation Analyze how different groups of visitors respond to each of your pages and the visitors themselves.

Live Cost Analysis You can compare search engine price information for optimizing your ROI.

Merchandise Reporting Identify the purchase of products and create reports with this feature.

Scenario Analysis Track your visitors through every step for analysis of the visitor.

Comparative Reporting Check your website from one month to another with reports.

Advanced Path Analysis Identify the most popular paths that you visitors take in your website.

Marketing Workflow Management With this tool you can do several things such as monitor site changes, and system outages. You can also create email alerts and share reports with others.

Which Is Best For You?

At this point Yahoo Analytics is only available for Yahoo! Small Business customers who host e-commerce sites with Yahoo!, as well as to advertisers who work with Yahoo! Custom Solutions and Yahoo! Buzz Marketing.

Yahoo! Web Analytics will be implemented in stages throughout the rest of 2008 and into 2009. So this is not fully functionally for everyone.

On the other hand, Google Analytics is. If you have a Yahoo! Small Business you are in luck and may be able to use Yahoo! Web Analytics. I would still recommend using Google Analytics as a tool. Everyone should be using the power of Google Analytics.

Author: Sandi Baker http://letusgetitdone.info

Google Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Google Keyword Tool is an indispensable tool for any online marketing campaign. Using this tool, you can find the estimated search volumes, Adwords advertiser competition and popularity of keywords. It is an excellent tool for finding new keywords since it provides extensive lists of related keywords and suggestions to help you generate new keyword ideas. You can then use they keywords in article or blog posts and target them to improve your rankings.

Google Webmaster Central

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

With a free account on Google Webmaster Central you have access to the important data that Google stores about your website. It can allow you to easily identify problems that the Google crawlers are having indexing your content. You can also view top search queries that visitors used to find your website on Google, backlinks to your website and even the code that the Googlebot sees when it visits your website. On the settings page, you can choose the Geographic Target for your website to specifically target search traffic in your local area. A new, recently added feature gives you data on how fast your website loads, which is a new ranking factor that Google has added to their search ranking algorithm.

Google Insights For Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

This is a tool that is similar to Google Trends but provides additional data that may be useful to your Search Engine Optimization efforts. When you enter a keyword into Google Insights For Search, you are given important data related to that keyword such as: search trends over time, regional interest in the keyword displayed on an interactive map and top related search keywords. If you are looking for ideas for creating a new blog posts, this can be a very useful tool.

Google Analytics

https://www.google.com/analytics/

Every webmaster needs to know how visitors find, navigate and interact with their website and this is where Google Analytics comes in. This tool provides extensive data on your visitors such as bounce rates, popular content, keywords used to find your website on Google search, referring websites, unique visitors and average time spent on your website. You can also set conversion goals for when visitors fill out a form, make a purchase or visit a specific page on your website, which allows you to identified from which traffic sources you are getting your most valuable traffic.

Google Website Optimizer
www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

The Google Website Optimizer allows you to test different version of your website to see which version is most effective at conversing visitors. It gives you hard data on which images, descriptions, headlines and layouts that are most effective in grabbing your visitors attention. If you want to keep your visitors engaged, this can be a useful tool along with Google Analytics to analyze and improve how your website is presented.

]]> http://priceburner.com/web-analytics-software/41/analytics/six-apart-comment-sniper-freelinereport-04-21-08/feed/ 0 http://priceburner.com/web-analytics-software/19/analytics/google-analytics-for-better-search-engine-marketing/ http://priceburner.com/web-analytics-software/19/analytics/google-analytics-for-better-search-engine-marketing/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:54:19 +0000 Nick Kurentz http://priceburner.com/web-analytics-software/19/analytics/google-analytics-for-better-search-engine-marketing/ Google Analytics for SEM
Urchin visitor tracking is now renamed ‘Google Analytics’ and is available to everyone for free! For those of you lucky enough to have signed up in the early stages, Google Analytics will open up a world of information you probably never knew about visitors on your site. For those not so lucky, you’ll have to wait till Google gets their act together and reopens the doors for new sign-ups to the analytics system.
Why you need Google Analytics website visitor tracking
Google Analytics provides free information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. It is an invaluable tool that all webmasters should use if they don’t already have some form of visitor tracking solution in place. Here’s 10 reasons why you need Google Analytics on your site:

It is free. And it offers just as much if not more functionality than most expensive visitor tracking solutions!
You need Analytics to understand how visitors use your site
You can identify where visitors leave your check-out or sign-up process and modify it to prevent losing leads
You can identify which pages and links visitors click on most and spend most time on, and position these pages and links appropriately
Analytics also tells you which sites users came to your site from
You can find out the most popular keywords users type into a search engine to find your site, thereby helping your search engine optimisation efforts
Visitor segmentation by new vs returning users, geography and referral source will offer invaluable insight when planning future business
Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google AdWords so that you can have almost end-to-end visibility in your search advertising results
Analytics allows tracking of other non-search-engine marketing media
Analytics will save you money and help you gain more customers

Pros and cons of Google Analytics
The benefits of using the Google Analytics solution are numerous. The fact that it’s free is mere icing on the cake.
* The setup is very straightforward and takes hardly any time
* It is a great solution providing a wide range of reports with a lot of flexibility
* Multiple sites to be tracked under one login
* Tracking campaigns from a wide variety of media is possible
* A/B ad testing is easy
* It integrates with all marketing media and can be used as a single portal to track multiple campaigns
* In depth reports on site navigation and use are invaluable
* Ecommerce tracking is included

Whilst the Google Analytics package provides a vast number of useful bits of information, it lacks two major features which most search engine marketers need – the ability to track individual user activity or trace activity back to an individual user level and the ability to track activity akin to click fraud. The eCommerce tracking features are not very straightforward to use.
Most irritatingly, though, just like any other Google product offering, the customer service associated with Google Analytics is abysmal, if not completely non-existant!
How Google Analytics might change search engine optimisation
By offering a free web site analytics solution, google have made a very sneaky and superbly calculated move in the war for search engine supremacy. Now that they have visibility not only into how Google users search for your site and whether they convert into sales on it, but also into how all visitors, even from Yahoo and MSN reach your site, how they use your site and whether they leave your site without making a purchase. Armed with that sort of usability information, Google could not only undermine all your search engine optimisation efforts, but also use the data they collect about MSN and Yahoo! search results with respect to your site and use it to strengthen their stronghold on the search landscape.
Google Analytics for SEM
PPC Management
Google Adwords

We have historically used a combination of the following tools and methods to gauge potential traffic volumes from natural search:

o Google Adwords / MSN AdCenter / Yahoo traffic estimators

o Online tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Wordze etc

o Existing PPC / Organic search analytics data

o Creating temporary PPC campaigns to test volumes

o Google Trends

Google Trends has always been useful to look at comparative volumes – for example, we often use it to see whether the singular or plural of a keyword is more popular. Beyond this, it has always been quite limited. A recent Google Trends update however, could revolutionise the forecasting of organic search traffic.

Now that’s all well and good but it still doesn’t help in estimating traffic for those terms, so how do you do that? Well, any worthwhile SEO agency should have a decent portfolio of #1 rankings for relatively high volume search terms. I would also expect them to have a decent analytics package in place on their clients’ sites, from which you can monitor the traffic those #1 rankings generate. This is key.

You may have already achieved a #1 position for ‘blue widgets’, and so are thinking about expanding your keyword list to include ‘yellow widgets’. You already know how many visitors your ‘blue widgets’ success is worth, so now use Google Trends to compare volumes with ‘yellow widgets’. If ‘blue widgets’ generates 100 visits per day, and Trends tells you that ‘yellow widgets’ is 0.6 of the volume, you know to expect 60 visits per day from a #1 position for ‘yellow widgets’. Useful eh!

This is great because it is sector independent. Your results will not lose accuracy if you are comparing a keyword from one sector to a keyword from another.

Of course, number 1’s can take time to achieve – particularly for competitive keywords and relatively unestablished sites. It can often be useful therefore, to provide keyword traffic forecasts for other first page positions. How? By making use of the notoriously leaked AOL click through data. Knowing that a #2 ranking is worth x% of the visitors of #1, #3 worth x-1% etc you can quickly build up a list of visitor volumes for each of the top 10 positions, by keyword.

Any such forecasts are however just that. Forecasts, estimations, approximations. We always allow for a small variance due to influences on Click Rate (CTR) from the SERPS. Typical influencing factors are:

o Brand Terms – Brand searches typically get a higher CTR.

o Long Tail Searches vs Generic Searches – Long tail searches generally result in a higher CTR because the searcher is further through the ’search cycle’. They know exactly what they are looking for and so are more likely to click a search listing.

o Titles and Meta Descriptions – more compelling search listing ‘creative’ usually sees a higher CTR than something bland and uninviting.

o PPC ads – Generally speaking, the more PPC ads that are present on a page (especially at the top) the lower CTR the natural results will receive.

While these factors may, to a certain extent skew your results, our SEO traffic forecasting tests using Google Trends always maintain a decent level of accuracy.

The upgrade of Google Trends has many positive implications and is a huge help to anyone involved in search marketing, so thanks Google! It’s nice to see a development that actually helps rather than hinders us SEOs!