Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [265]
Table 21-3: Analytics Information for a single search term with two different site-entry points
Metric Data for home page as entry point Data for product page as entry point
Average ranking in Google #3 #12
Search referrals 2,682 1,007
Bounce rate 22% 13%
Conversion rate 1.8% 4.3%
Number of conversions 48 43
The story of these segments showed that visitors who entered the site at the product page, which ranked on the second page of results, produced a more effective visit in terms of conversions. The number of conversions was comparable to those produced by the higher-ranking home page. What was most telling was the significantly higher bounce rate and the significantly lower conversion rate experienced by the home page compared to the product page.
Impatient visitors did not do well in navigating beyond the home page to the product page. Those visitors who entered the site closer to their intended destination experienced a higher level of success. The mandate as a result of this observation was clear: focus more attention on getting the product page to rank higher, remove the terms from the title of the home page, and make a more visible link to the category page. Doing these things caused the category page to rank higher than the home page and be the primary entry page for this term, which then produced a more profitable ranking, based on conversions.
Segment Bounce Rates
I’ve already touched on considering bounce rates in analysis this week, but now I’ll focus on segmenting specifically by bounce rate. Bounce rates are one of the most aggravating measurements for many marketers. However, I find them to be the best way to improve your website, because they are clear indicators of issues within a particular page of your website. Bounce rates indicate that the content, design, call to action, or other factors do not line up with the expectations of the visitor. Their reaction to the page is found in the bounce rate. A high bounce rate means that they have rejected your site based on the initial impression, and you need to make a better impression in order to improve.
A publisher in one of my seminars was so excited by the analytics training that they went back to their site to discover what they could. They were particularly troubled by a new article that was receiving bad feedback from the readers. This publisher had written an article titled “Holiday Time Travel” with ideas for destinations and low-cost getaways during the winter holidays. It had quickly grown as the highest read article but also the most unfavorable in the comments. After the analytics seminar, she started segmenting her traffic and found the reason for this strange behavior. She found that the top search phrase sending visitors to the article was time travel. No wonder the bounce rate was so high! The expectation of nearly 60 percent of the search traffic was information about time travel, and this article did not deliver the information about space-time theories that they wanted; it was about travel during the holidays. (The confusion was in part because the article title was missing a hyphen that makes all the difference in meaning—for the best human-readability, the title should have been “Travel Ideas for the Holidays.”) Analytics makes sense because it puts information in perspective!
Thursday: Segment Content
Content segmentation is a valuable method of finding important information as valued by your customer. I find that most organizations evaluate content based on the investment of the content or their own internal organizational value but lack the necessary means to determine the visitor’s value of that same content. By using the contextual measurement tools available