Some site owners possess this wrong notion that bounce rate is a useless indicator. They also believe that the exclusivevalue of page usage indicates success of a website which is equally wrong notion. The most important thing to know here is that you should be hyperaware of the context always and every time. You must use this particularly useful mindset when you view other important metrics including conversion rates and even the clickthroughrate.
Ideally, as an expert web analyst you should havea humble, curious, and inquisitive mind and there are certainly no absolutes in this case. Remember, your prime focus should be on looking for any signs or things that are unusual for the site. You should cat more like a crime scene detective digging deeper to find proper and relevant clues when you areconducting web analytics analysis.
You must remember a few other things as well in this regard and these are:
- There is no ‘good’ conversion rate
- There is no ‘good’ bounce rate and
- There is no ‘good’ page value.
Just like the crime scene investigator looks for the history, the motive and the suspects so that the wrong person is not put behind the bars, you must also look for the history of your visitors to ensure that you can convert them and put them in your customer list.
Consider the highest value
There are a few specific steps to follow when you conduct a website analysis and want to have the most accurate results.
Start with considering the highest value. Ideally, there are two high value places that you should start looking into right away. These are:
- High volume and low value pages such as the old blog posts that typically gets a lot of organic search engine traffic simply because it ranks high enough for a popular keyword used in it and
- Low volume and high value pages such as the checkout page of your website.
You will need to ensure that you optimize either of those pages so that it eventually results in big value for your website as well as your business.
One of the most practiced methods for generating better site optimization ideas is to look at the high volume and low value pages to discover better ways. This decision making process will influence other decisions.The rudimentary facts for this method are pretty simple and easy.
- First, you have to consider that if your website generates a lot of organic traffic towards it but have very little or no conversions, it should be your primary focus to ensure better optimization.
- Next, you should delve deep into this page to discover the problem areas and what might be wrong in it. It may be that the visitors are not finding the things that they exactly want in the page or you may not have offered any email opt in or content upgrade. It may also be that there are a lot of technical errors in the page that is affecting the conversion rate in a negative way.
- Lastly, consider the actions that you need to take for the best site optimization and make sure that it aligns with the actions that your users want you to take. But first decide whether ro not you have even asked the users to take any action in the first place.
Ideally, there are lots of conversion questions that may come up in your mind once you find out the errors in your marketing strategy. Also, there are all sorts of tools and software that will help you to get all the relevant answers to each and every question that crosses your mind.
About bounce rate
Experts like accessibility Siteimprove and others consider bounce rate to be the most important factor to ensure better performance and high SEO results for a given website.
- When you know the bounce rate it will help you to know what the visitors to your site did not do as wanted by you. However, failure of the visitors to perform the necessary actions will also largely depend on the design of your website.
- On the other hand, page value will tell you what the visitors did not buy from you. It will also give you a fair and clear idea as to why they did not buy your product.
When you are considering site analytics, you will want that the site increasesyour chances to make a sale and ensure future success. You will do well if you learn from the past and focus on the future actions that you want your users to take so that you can reach your goal more quickly.
As far as bounce rate is concerned and you go for those high volume pages that have low value, you may change it to a success indicator as per your choice of course. You can use an advanced filter for that matter as that will help you in performing your analysis in a much better way. This will help you to:
- Make your analytical results even more foolproof
- Filter out the pages that are too small for a proper sample size.
Typically, if enough people do not see your page then the success indicator should be considered as unreliable. In such situations, you should examine the pages in-depth and discover the bad or suspicious parts of the site. You may find that there are wrong elements or technical errors in it that is making your web page boring or unclear to the readers. This will result in awful UX, which is the last thing that a website should provide.
Lastly, you can take a cue from similar pages to yours that are performing well and implement a few of their elements to make your ‘bad’ pages as ‘good’ as theirs. This will help you to prepare a navigation summary that will include all important things such as where the visitors are going, when they are leaving the key pages, what are the indications of something is missing from your pages and act accordingly after identifying the proper links.
