Analytics « Kristeen Bullwinkle

How to evaluate a newly added webpage

You’ve sweated out the words, located or created great visuals, and the new page has been posted. Was it worth the effort? Here a few ways to measure your results.

Why did you create the page?

First we need to look at why you created a new page. To capture new organic search traffic? Introduce a new product line? Answer a question your customer service people are getting sick of hearing? Provide more information to someone earlier or later into the buying cycle? Encourage other sites to link to your page?

Landing page

Let’s assume you wrote a new landing page. This is a page you can expect visitors to land upon from an organic search, a link in an email campaign, a social media link, or an ad. Success could be measured in any of these ways:

Number of conversions (sales, signups, contributions, etc.) made by visitors to that page. All good analytics programs will show this, although you have to tell it what you mean by a conversion.
Bounce rate for page. If this number is higher than for other landing pages, investigate the reason. Did the page match the promise of the ad? Are the keywords leading to the page appropriate to the searcher’s context? Are the links I have on the page engaging enough to lead the reader further into the site?
(My personal blog gets traffic for the word caruncle which I use in reference to the rooster’s comb, but I know that visitors could be coming to learn about urethral caruncles, the red portion of the corner of the eye, or even the fleshy structure attached to the seed. I expect a high bounce rate for organic search referrals to that page.)
Number of new or returning visitors to the page. If you’ve written a page to pull in new traffic and to reach people early in the buying cycle or education phase, then you want high numbers of new visitors. If you created a page directed at current customers/clients/readers, or to people later in the buying cycle, then you want to see a higher number of returning visitors viewing the page.
Search engine optimization. Let’s look at a few analytics reports. These are all from Google Analytics. Google Analtyics has two reports you want to look at to see if you are successfully making it to the first page of search results and if your landing page is attracting hits. (Remember that your search ranking is also influence by the searcher’s geography, past history, and social network.)
Let’s look first at the Queries report where we’ll see if your site is doing well for various keywords. This report will be most helpful if your new page introduces a new keyword to your site.

This site isn’t showing up well for the keywords “cowboy boots,” but is doing better for “black and white cowboy boots.” This is a longer tail keyword which tend to perform better since they have less competition. Even though its average position is 15, it isn’t attracting any visitors. The click-through rate (CTR) is zero. That probably means that the page title and meta description for the landing page should be rewritten in an attempt to get those searchers to click on my site’s search result listing.

In the landing page report we see that the page is doing a little better than we would have assumed by just looking at the query report. It is getting some traffic. It’s showing up deep within Google search results with an average position of 180. More investigation will show that the page is getting traffic from other long tail keywords like “girls in cowboy boots and shorts.” To attract more traffic I’d want to introduce or repeat those keywords into the page title, headings, image descriptions, and the general text. But only it they were relevant to my goals for the page.

A better custom report can be created like this one below. It looks at your pages and tells you if you made money or met your goals with the page. In this example, my real goal was to get my friends to encourage my boot purchases, but the goal completions reflected here are visitors who came to a page and then visited at least two more pages (my site-wide goal).

Not a landing page

Not all pages are landing pages. Perhaps you created a new page showing your certifications/awards/testimonials, a page for employee bios and photos, an axillary research report, an explanation about shipping charges, or a new 404 error page. Your goals for the page might not be more traffic. It might be to support your customer service staff by providing a resource they can direct callers to, for example. It might be a legal page like your privacy notice. It might even be a page to satisfy a CEO’s vanity.

Exclude the page from search. For these types of pages you want to check to see that they are not getting search traffic. Be sure that pages like your privacy statement have been excluded in your robots.txt file so the search engines don’t index the page. You might not want to exclude the page from your own site’s search, however, if it has one. Other pages might warrant remaining available for global searches.

Pageviews. You still want to look at your statistics for these pages. For the employee bio page, you might discover that one of your employee’s name is getting search traffic. Maybe that person has a social media following you didn’t know about. For the privacy page, a spike in visits might mean that there’s something negative in the media about your company/organization or about privacy concerns in general that you should know about.

Conversions. It’s important to know which of your web pages are the power hitters and which are critical. A page without much search traffic can still be an important page in moving your visitor along to taking an action you want them to take.

Look at the stats like these on right. You’ll discover if your new page shows up in the path of those visitors who turn into conversions. Maybe that new page about shipping will give more visitors the confidence to make a purchase.

In the example below, we see that a fairly old blog post lead directly to a request for a price quote. It’s time to review that post and learn from it how to make newer ones perform that well. Or update it and repost it social media sites.

Make sure your pages are performing. One of the great things about the Web is that you can quickly learn if you have a failure. You can keep testing a page until it performs at its highest level.

Why is no one visiting my site?

This presentation is adapted from one I created for a client. To view the sample images you’ll need to expand the slide show. Just click on the arrows icon to expand the screen. To return to this page, hit the Escape key.

Why is no one visiting my site?

View more presentations from Kristeen Bullwinkle.

Problems with high bounce rates?

Just notice a sudden jump in your bounce rate?

Don’t panic, but get ready to spend a bit of time probing for the cause.

Possible causes

A broken page. Make sure the page still loads. Make sure it can be viewed on an iPad or other viewing tool that more and more of your intended visitors might be using. Are you requiring visitors to download something, like another application, that they just aren’t interested in doing?

Irrelevant, unexpected, or insulting content. Did you re-write the content? Add a new graphic to the page? You may have made vast improvements to a page but changed the look enough that your frequent visitors assume they’ve gone to the wrong site. Or you may have added content most viewers find distracting from their goal and so they leave your site.

I suspect that Abercrombie’s push-up bikini top for tween girls controversy caused traffic and bounce rate spike for their site. People weren’t going to the site to shop, but to see what the controversy was about.

Try rewriting the page or reorganizing the content. Try shortening it. Try a different visual. See what keywords are being used by searchers to discover that page and punch up related content. Look at what pages most visitors saw before the page in question and let that guide your edits.

Misdirected searchers. Look at your traffic sources by keywords. Do you see an unusual spike?

That might mean that you added a great timely news page, but it could also mean that people are being misdirected to that page. Look through your keywords sorted by bounce rate. Is there an unfamiliar keyword listed or did your intern’s name, which appears on a single page, suddenly show up with tons of visitors? Run your own search for the poorly performing keyword. You may discover that someone with the same name as your intern just got named to the Olympic Team or a news story surfaced about someone finding a rat tail in a sandwich that has a name similar to one of your products. Weird stuff like this happens. People come to your page searching for one thing and find something else and leave. That’s an appropriate action and no cause for worry. The bounce rate for that page should go back to normal in time.

If your ad copy promises something not evident on your landing page, visitors will feel mislead and misdirected and leave. So if you promise free shipping in your ad, you don’t want a big button or paragraph about comparing shipping charges on your landing page. An ad for mountain bikes should lead to a page listing road, racing, BMX, and mountain bikes mixed together.

Misdirecting external link. Check to see where the traffic to your high bounce rate page is coming from. Did a few bloggers just add a link to your site as a gag? Or, on a positive note, perhaps people are linking to your graphic as an excellent example of information design and the readers just want to see that graphic.

Is your bounce rate consistently low?

If you have a blog, recipe, or news site, that might not be a problem. Readers could be coming to your site daily, reading your latest post, and then moving on. Take a look at time on site and returning visitor numbers. These might make you feel better about that bounce rate.

Usability problems. Watch someone else use your site and have them talk aloud as they do so. Or better yet, have someone else do this and tell you what he heard and saw. If visitors can’t immediately determine what your site or page is about and what they can expect to accomplish there, they are likely to leave. If the site is cluttered and confusing and full of competing calls to action, a visitor might be overwhelmed and leave.

Navigation problems. If a visitor comes to your site and can’t figure out how to get around it, she is likely to leave.

Content problem. Your content can have too verbose, too short, too complex, too simplistic, or too confusing to read. It can also read as a dead-end. If your page exists to tell people how to properly remove an obstruction from a snow blower, you can expect a high bounce rate. You hope that they go out and get back to clearing their driveway before they come back and explore more of your site. But if you page exists to inform people of how easy your snow blower is to use, you want them to move to the next step of looking at size options or pricing. If that page has a high bounce rate, then your copy might be the problem.

Misdirected searches. If your site’s content is about something with a commonly used or commonly misspelled term, then you might see a higher bounce rate. Let’s say you sell confections in all sorts of shapes, including a horse bridle. Someone searching for “bridle confection” might find you when they wanted treats for their wedding instead. Writing good titles and meta descriptions for the page should help considerably. Let people know what the page is really about and eliminate that confusion.

Design problem. I have left sites just because they did not look professional. You don’t want your site to immediately cause a lost of trust because the design doesn’t match the tone of your brand and your message.

The good news is that a high bounce rate is a problem that can be solved.

Tracking links to your site (backlinks)

You know that you need to get links to your site. Maybe you’ve submitted your site to a couple directories and begged for a link or two. That’s just the start in a website publisher’s list of tasks regarding links. It’s probably not your most important task, but it does deserve regular attention.

Why should I track backlinks?

You want to know which sites are sending you traffic and why.

Not all backlinks are rated equal. They aren’t even all necessarily good. Are people linking to you with respect or with derision? A directory site full of paid listings is not going to bring you the same type of traffic as a link from a satisfied customer’s Tweet. And neither are as valuable as a link from an authoritative site with positive reviews of your product.

You might find that you’re getting so much free traffic from another site that it’s worth creating a landing page just for those visitors. For example, if you know you’re getting links from a professional association’s site list of recommended resources, you could create a page welcoming them and even providing them with a special offer. (You just need to be sure you give the association the new link you want them to use or route the traffic through server variables.)

These inbound links are crucial as you work on search engine optimization. The search engines like some links better than others, too. A link from a “link farm” or an article that exists just to provide links may provide limited traffic (or get you banned from a search engine index.) It will never pay off as well as a link from a site such as a recognized expert’s curated listing of links or from a popular site with few competing outbound links. It’s important to be popular with a respectable crowd.

They can lose traffic

You could be losing visitors because of outdated links. Maybe you changed the URL for a page because you got a new CMS, moved from .htm to .php pages, or redesigned your site. You need to watch your current backlinks so you’ll know who to inform of any changes in the future. A broken link to your site might be the fault of someone else, but you’ll still suffer the consequences. You might get a visits from motivated people, but they’ll come frustrated that they had to go in search of the correct link themselves.

Links place your site in context

People can link to your site because they are offering it to their readers as an example of how things should be done or because your product is a perfect complement to theirs. They also could be linking to your site as a poor example, or as part of a joke. Your product could appear in a top ten list of useless kitchen items. Your name could appear as a link with the words “this leader” or “this joker.” A lazy web page author might list your heavy-duty containers on a page with canning jars and storage containers because you sell containers—even though they aren’t meant for food.

You want to know this information if you’re concerned with your brand image and reputation.

Search engines can get as confused as readers if the words used as part of the link to your site are inappropriate. If you’re selling childrens’ toys, you don’t want the link to your site to be “dangerous toys” or “as dangerous as this” because the word dangerous then gets associated with your brand name in people’s minds and in search engine indexes.

Backlinks are an excuse to begin or continue a conversation.

Locating a new link to your site means you can now send a message to the author of that link and thank him or her. You can inform them of something new on your site and ask for their feedback on it. You can request that they correct, update or remove an unflattering link.You can ask them what you could do to make them happier with your product or service. Perhaps the linking organization has an event you could sponsor for additional PR and links.

It might be a success metric for your site

For a few blogs or sites created to influence the public or an industry, earning links from governmental or educational sites, or a pundit’s blog might be one measurement of your influence and reach. These links might be as important or more important than the number of visitors to your site who complete a contact form. This might be true if it’s more important for your message and your work to be cited than to be read in it’s entirety.

How to find your backlinks

It used to be easy to track links to your site. All you needed to do was go to one of the major search engines and type “link: www.yoursite.com” and you got a pretty complete list. No more. Now you have to dig.

Pay for it

Link Insight provides reports not only on pages linking to yours, but also pages linking to your competitors. The tool helps identify high quality linking opportunities. It has reports for just about any link-related purpose you could come up with.

Clicky is another option at less cost.

Clicky

Use a free tool

Free analytic tools will only show you links from sites providing you with traffic. They cannot identify broken links to your site or missed linking opportunities.

Yahoo Site Explorer doesn’t provide you with much information, but it does show inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Google Webmaster also provides just the links, but it’s easier to view them by page rather than just seeing all the links to your domain.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics provides you with better insight into the worth of your backlinks.

: Google Analytics

For more information see How to get the hot links and Ten web stats you should be tracking.

Why your writers need to see your analytics reports

Would you like your editorial meetings more focused on your audience interests? Analytics can give them specific information to act upon.

Writers love feedback and will be fascinated by all this data, especially if they are more used to working in print media. Sometimes they are further removed from their audiences than they’d like and need to rely on internal resources for content ideas. Luckily it’s pretty easy to give them data they can trust more than opinions from higher ranking staff or executives.

Web analytics program like Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics—both free—provide insights into your readers’ interests.

What are people already reading on your site?

Keywords

Look at your organic keywords and not those from your paid advertising campaigns. Review the most popular keywords and look for surprises. Are there words missing?

Now that you’ve dug a little deeper and you might discover that “linens for crafts” is a fairly popular keyword phrase. Maybe you want to add a new page with craft patterns using old bed sheets and link to it from your popular recycled bedding page. Or maybe you’re seeing “bamboo cloth” rating highly and you could write something on linens and other items made from bamboo fabrics.

Make a list of the poorly performing keywords. Is “recycled bedding” as a search phrase showing high bounce rates? Do your own Web search and you might discover that many of your visitors were probably looking for pet bedding and not how to recycle old sheets. Maybe you want to add an article for pet owners.

Now look at the terms in the middle. You’ll find many useful keywords on down the list that you can assemble into new topic areas to write about. Or you’ll find opportunities for capturing traffic from searchers who use a long string of keywords because know exactly what they want (and will be happy to find that you have it) or who keep adding terms because their previous searches haven’t been fruitful (and will be grateful to find you have what they seek.)

Referring pages and sites

See how bloggers and other sites owners are linking to your pages. These links are explicit votes for your content. Are links coming to the pages you already knew were popular? Or are many linking to more specialized pages that you thought weren’t performing well? Is that page on large steel storage containers showing up on farming blogs when you hadn’t even considered farmers as one of your target markets?

Are you seeing people coming to your pages from an image search engine? Maybe you should spend a bit more time considering your image and graphic choices.

Are you seeing traffic from Twitter? Maybe it’s time to spend more time writing content for it or other social media.

What are people searching for on your site?

If you have an internal search engine then you have a profitable mine to go digging around in. If you’re writing about student housing but seeing lots of searches for “room and board” then you know that there’s an audience out there using terminology you aren’t. This is a great place to go searching for synonyms you should be employing in your writing (and even navigation.)

Perhaps you’re finding people searching for “recipes” when your site is just about food safety issues. Perhaps adding a few recipes will draw in more readers and keep them engaged with your site. Or you’re finding people searching for your product “Mmmyummies” as “Yummers.” You’ll want to create a new page for those searches with a title like “Mmmyummies are yummers.” It might sound corny, but it’s better than giving them a “no page found” message.

What are people commenting on or sharing?

You probably won’t find this type of data from your regular analytics packages. However, your blogging tool might provide you with a listing of your most recent comments or entries with the most comments. Those comments can be mined for new content ideas.

Setting up a report from socialmention.com, bit.ly, Facebook Insights, Google Alerts or other similar tools will give you an idea of what’s being shared. These will also give you a great sense for how your product or service is being talked about. You might find that an article is needed to clarify an issue in your industry or to address a general concern expressed by your intended audiences.

Ten web stats you should be tracking

There are many statistics you can track for your website and it can be confusing as to which ones really matter. And while the answer for you is probably “it depends on your needs” there are certainly some stats that everyone should watch. Some of these are stats you can easily be glanced at for reassurance that there are no new big problems on your site. Others answers questions about the effectiveness of your marketing and content.

1. Trend lines

Analytics data is most reliable when you’re looking at trends. If you see any number taking a big jump up or down you know that you have something you need to investigate. For example, if visits from your best lead generating site take a sudden dive, you need to look again at that site and the link they have given you. Perhaps the site has gone down or been redesigned.

2. Inbound links/traffic sources

This stat answers the following simple questions: Where are people coming from when they visit your site? Is that link you just requested from your professional association providing you with any traffic or leads? Are the ads you’re paying for bringing you any traffic? Are links in your tweets sending viewers your way? How about your LinkedIn profile and business page? Is there someone you should thank for their new link to your site?

3. Keywords

What keywords are people using to find your site? Are they the keywords you optimized your site for? Are they the keywords you’re bidding on for your ad campaign? Are there keywords you didn’t expect and around which more content could be created? If you’re a new business you’ll certainly want to see an increasing number of searches for your company name. If you’ve been around for a bit, you’ll be interested in seeing what the more atypical, but accurate, keywords are. Those are clues to new terms you could be optimizing for or bidding for in your PPC campaign.

4. Content

What’s your most popular content? What pages might be acting as your home page? Is it time to update some of your more popular pages? Is that great new page you added to your site getting any traffic? Are your landing pages getting high numbers? Is there a page drawing a lot of traffic that needs a new call to action on it to make it pay off even more? Is there a page that you just threw up in a hurry that’s getting a lot of traffic and should be re-written and updated? Did your last email generate the traffic you expected to your new offer page?

5. Bounce rate

I want you to spend some real time with this stat. This tells you what pages are drawing visitors that then immediately flee from your site. Don’t panic if you have a high bounce rate for repeat visitors to your blog entries because you can expect those visitors to come, read your latest entry, and then leave without viewing the content they read last week. But if the landing page for your ad has a 50 percent bounce rate you know you’re in trouble. That’s when you dig a little deeper to see if the keywords and ad copy bringing people to that site are appropriate. You look at the content on your landing page and look at your call to action to see if it’s good enough to draw people deeper into the site. You look at your content and design and navigation. You ask someone else to look at your landing page. You look at the time people spent on that page to try to determine if they might have read it or not. You add related links to pages deeper in your site or change your offer or do something else to draw visitors further into your site.

6. Number of page views

This can be a confusing stat. If you’ve just redesigned your site it can be very hard to know if a higher number of page views is a good or bad sign. It might be that visitors are being drawn deeper into your site or they could be clicking around because they are hopelessly lost. I’d recommend some usability testing to be sure your visitors are leaving your site informed rather than frustrated. This stat might be most important to site owners who are moving visitors through a sales funnel on their site or who have a goal of educating their visitors. You might know that the more interaction someone has with your site, the more likely you will make a sale, get them to take another action, or change their opinion.

7. New visitors

This number won’t be exact, but you’ll want to look at trends again. Any big drop is a reason for concern and investigation. If you have new site you definitely want to see this number trending upwards. If you’re looking for visitor loyalty or you know that your buyers tend to do a lot of research before they buy, then you may be happier with higher return visitor numbers. But for those trying to grow a business, you’ll want plenty of new visitors. And you’re going to want to know what content is drawing them in.

Note: Absolute unique visitors is a more accurate metric than new visitors. But since we’re looking at trends at this point, don’t worry too much about that.

8. Internal search terms

If you have search on your site, this report can be full of insights for you. You can find terms you didn’t expect people to be using, you can get an idea of what areas of your site are hard to locate through navigation, you can discover content your visitors are expecting to see but aren’t finding. It can be fun to discover who the stars in your company are by looking at the number of searches for them by name. Are there search terms that you should turn into keywords for optimizing your site?

9. Time on page/time on site

Reporting tools can’t compute the time a visitor spent on the last page they viewed (because there is no subsequent page visit to measure against) but this is still a useful metric. You’ll get an idea of which pages capture a reader’s interest and which ones they skip right past. Do the numbers match your expectations? How about the expectations of your sales team? Time on site can be a measure of how engaging your site is, but it can also indicate people coming to your site and confidently selecting links only to be confused by them and less confidently moving to another link until they give up.

10. Goals and conversions

I saved the best for number ten. You have goals for your site, right? All these stats mean very little if no one coming to your site actually makes a purchase, a call, a comment or whatever action it is you want readers to take. Google Analytics and other tools allow you to track many of your goals. So you’ll want to look at goals such as number of people seeing the thank you page for signing up for your newsletter or the confirmation page for a purchase. Or you might want to track the number of downloads of your most recent report or the number of people who viewed a video past the 2 minute mark. You can usually take a look at conversion funnels from analytic packages, too, and discover if there are any places where you have too many people abandoning that funnel.

11. Social media posts

I haven’t found any tool that tracks this as well as I would like so this is a metric you should track but might have trouble tracking. You’ll want to know if you’re being talked about and what people are saying. You should have specific social media goals that you can measure and track. Are you looking for referrals, links, positive mentions, leads or an additional method of service? You can also get a few clues as to what sites/media you should be tracking after investigating your traffic sources. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic from one social source then you certainly want to monitor it carefully. Most social media sites have tools for that. Feedburner can be helpful in tracking RSS feeds. Your blogging tool most likely has some reporting feature that will let you track the number of comments per blog entry, at least. Facebook provides stats for fan pages. Socialmention.com is another tool you might try to follow the social media world’s interest in your site or your product.

There are other stats you can track and which provider you with more specific and deeper insights. But these should give you a good overview of how your site is performing.

Kristeen Bullwinkle

Online marketing, content strategy and site optimization