Something a lot of people who are new to website development, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) overlook is how effective is their website? After all, a website is a collection of individual pages, and typically we want people to move from one page to another, right?
However, often times the navigation of the site is confusing, or non-existent. There is no clear route for the visitor to go from one page to another, and no clear direction of what you want them to do (your “Call to Action”)
A great way to observe this is to use an analytics program to view your website’s “Bounce Rate”. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your site, look at one page and leave without going anywhere else. It could also be people who come to your site for only a few seconds and leave. By monitoring the bounce rate, you can determine how well your pages are performing, and get an view of your site’s “ease of use”. If your bounce rates are extremely high (70%-80% or higher), chances are SOMETHING is wrong. Whether it’s navigation, call to action, visual appearance or relevance of content will of course vary from site to site.
If you haven’t used an analytics package before, Google’s analytics is a great place to start, is packed full of information and will give you just about every statistic you could want. For a great overview on how to use an analytics package to analyze your site’s bounce rate, read Avinash Kaushik’s bounce rate article. It’s a great in-depth review of bounce rate and what it all means.
There are lots of metrics and analytics programs out there, some of the more well-known ones are:
So what’s the point of all of this? The point is analyze, analyze, analyze! You’re doing the work of putting your site or you blog out there, you add content diligently and try to add value for your viewers. Why not go the extra step and make sure what your delivering to the world is the best it can be? Maximize your efforts, learn from your mistakes and realize this is part of the fun! Learning the process and understanding why and how things work, will make you a more effective blogger, marketer or e-commerce site owner.
Happy analyzing!
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