Are Your Metrics Interactive?

Google analytics gives you the ability to understand the traffic that is coming to your website.

But are you looking at that data? And are you making decisions that direct your marketing and site design off that data?

One of the most important reports I use commercially is the multivariant test, by delivering two different versions of a page to consumers and measuring the percentage of visitors that go on to reach the checkout stage i'm able to tweek web site designs over time to improve the conversion rate.

Recently for example we made a subtle change to the header at our Bathroom Showers site, at the top of every page is the USP in capital letters. It wasn't always in capitals, and the wording used to be slightly longer. The result of this change was a small but noteable increase in the number of conversions.

The code which generated this report was actually coded by me, but on ocassion I use the Google multivariant test software too. These are publicly avialable and free to use, so if you aren't using them to help reach your goals then you are a fool.

But there is more important information available within Google in the basic Analytic reports. Let me tell you how I have been using them on this site to drive it's steady and sustained growth.

My favorite report is the Benchmark report, I like it because it allows me to compare my site to other sites of similar size so that I can see how my site is doing, from this I know whether I am doing things right, whether the site is growing, and whether I need to change either the content or the way I market the site. It has a number of important metrics.

Site visits over the last month are 285. This is pretty much what I expected to see, but most importantly you can see that I am comparing my site to other offbeat arts & entertainment sites. Sure I also blog about ecommerce & tech stuff periodically, but the site mostly surrounds my humour and that's the metric i'm most interested in at the moment. You can see from here that the average number of visits for offbeat sites of this size is only 30, so i'm 850% ahead of target.

This is the statistic which has been bothering me most, A lower score here is good because this is showing the percentage of visitors who only viewed one page before leaving the site. A while ago I was worse than average here with a 70% bounce rate, I have taken pains to increase this by working more on my navigation, the menu is more stylish and the categories now have descriptive paragraphs under them.

These changes got me to a bounce rate that is comparable to the benchmark value of similar sites. Further experiments will help me figure out how to improve so I can go beyond the average.

The number of pages served is very interesting, you can see here that I am smashing the benchmark value of 55. The two peeks coincide with external links which pointed to my site, the meens that those people who viewing more than 1 page are viewing quite a few.

Again I am smashing the benchmark with time on site, the average offbeat site has a page view time of 15 seconds. On my site visitors are hanging around for 4 minutes. This suggests that my visitors are taking the time to read my articles so i'm doing a good job.

So what do I draw from this? Well my areas of focus are bounce rate and overall keeping the number of visitors increasing.

285 is paltry to me as i'm quite used to having much much larger sites. The value is inadequate in my eyes even if it is ahead of the benchmark.

To improve my bounce rate I need to make visitors aware that there is more good content on the site, they are clealry reading the articles but not enough users are going forward to interact with the site.

I need to continue to increase the number of visitors to my site. Clearly the external link postings worked but this is not a sustainable strategy as it involves manual work. I like it when things happen for me without me having to do anything. So currently these things are my area of focus, stay tuned over the coming months to see how I achieve this.

We've looked at just two reports that Google provides but there are many more within the Analytics software, it is free, so make sure you study them - the information has real implications for how you can change your site and the way that you present your site when advertising it. This is some of the most important information available to you as a site owner.

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