Traffic Dips
Was there ever a time when your traffic dipped drastically? Sometimes these things are flukes and sometimes they aren’t. A good way find out if it wasn’t a fluke is to check sites like Quantcast.com to see if these traffic dips also hit your competitors.

Industry Performance
If you want to see how you stack up against your competition you can use services like Compete.com that can visually show you a long-term traffic comparison.

Not only does Compete.com show you how many more visitors you need to catch up to your competition, but they also show you, which competitors are declining in growth and where they are getting their traffic from.

Getting Down and Dirty
Some sites, like Gizmodo.com, don’t mind sharing their stats through services like Sitemeter.

If any of your competitors are publicly revealing their Sitemeter stats, I highly recommend that you take the time to analyze their stats. Some of the things that you should analyze are:

1. Visitors by location – this will show you what regions your competition is getting traffic from and if you should be trying to do the same.
2. Entry pages – the homepage isn’t always the most popular page. Analyzing your competitor’s entry pages will help you understand what is causing them to receive most of their traffic.
3. Hourly traffic – if you can spot trends on the times people visit your competitor’s site, this will help you tune your marketing campaigns. For example if you notice the mornings are better than the afternoons, you can run campaigns during the morning and pause them during the afternoon.

Twitter Search
A good way to compare who is getting the most buzz in your industry is to use Twitter’s search feature. Through this feature you can type in your company’s name as well as your competitors and see what people are saying.

On top of this you can go through specific tweets and see if someone is saying anything good or even bad about your competition. This is a great way to build relationships with potential customers.

Trends
Who doesn’t want more traffic? Through Google Trends you can see what’s hot and what’s not. And if you happen to write on something that is hot, your chances of getting more traffic will increase.

In addition to that you can also compare your website’s popularity versus your competitors. You can do this by analyzing what news is causing your competition to grow and what cities your competition is dominating you in.

Conclusion
Although public stats are usually inaccurate if you look at them on a site-by-site basis, they can be very accurate when you use them to analyze a whole industry. So instead of ignoring them, start leveraging them!

Pageviews per visitor

Some referring sites will drive more page views per visitor. If your revenue is ad driven, it is really important to increase your page views per visitor. In this case here are a few things you can do:

1. Look for the referring sites that drive you the most pageviews per visitor.
2. Analyze why those specific sites drive you more page views per visitor. In most cases those sites drive you more page views per visitor because they tend to be more related to your website.
3. After you understand why those specific sites drive you more pageviews, consider creating a business relationship with them. There is always more you can do with them.
4. Lastly, you want to find new sites that haven’t linked to you yet that are relevant to your business. These sites should help increase your average pageviews per visitor.

Bounce rate

If certain referring sites have a high bounce rate, your conversions from these traffic sources are probably going to be really low. One thing you can do is use services like Google Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg to get a better understanding of how visitors from specific traffic sources engage with your website.

One thing you can also try out is to show customized messages to certain referring traffic sources, similar to the screenshot below.

Time on site

Sometimes people just don’t want to spend too much time on your website. Trying to solve this is a very difficult thing to do. If most of your referring traffic sources have a very low time on site, there is probably a lot of room for improvement.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to survey your audience. This way you can find out what they like about your website and what they dislike. Hopefully you will be able to fix the things they dislike and understand their needs better which should help increase the time each visitor spends on your website.

Engagement

In most cases, the best referring traffic sources are the ones who that bring visitors who have a high level of engagement with you site. For each site engagement is going to be different, but for a blog a common engagement metric is the number of comments.

If you look at the screenshot above it shows what referring sites cause visitors to comment on my blog posts. One traffic source that I would have never expected to cause a decent amount of engagement is Twitter. So after finding out how valuable Twitter is, I decided to put Twitter badges on my blog. This has helped increase traffic from Twitter, thus causing more comments on my blog.

You can’t just measure referring sites based on the traffic they drive; you have to look at which sites are causing engagement. So stop measuring vanity metrics and start the measuring actionable metrics.

Percentage of new visitors

Don’t just analyze which traffic sources are sending you traffic, but look at which traffic sources are driving you new visitors. Some sources are going to drive you a lot of traffic, but very few new visitors.

If you want to grow your website you have to get new visitors coming to your website. So instead of just trying to convince related or somewhat competing sites to link to you, go after new sites whose visitors may have never heard of your site.

Low hanging fruit

Instead of sorting referring traffic from high to low, I prefer sorting from low to high. This allows you to see what sites are linking to you, but aren’t driving much traffic.

For example, Huffington Post linked to my website and drove very little traffic. So instead of assuming that the Huffington Post is a useless referring site, I’ll try to get my website on there again because according to Alexa, it is a very popular site. Plus if a website already linked to you once, you have a very high chance of getting a link again.

Geo based traffic

If your business specializes in regional sales, you need to start going after regional traffic. What you will notice is that certain referring sites drive more traffic from specific regions.

Building relationships with sites that concentrate on a specific region is the best way to get more specific geographic based traffic. The easiest way to do this is to get involved in local business events within that region.

Conclusion

Traffic isn’t always about quantity. If you want to grow your website go after quality referring traffic and don’t just worry about your raw visitor count going up.

Learning Search

Unless you are only selling a handful of products, you have a search box on your ecommerce website. Users tend to use the search feature on a lot of websites because it helps them find what they are looking for, a lot faster. Right? In most cases yes, but if you aren’t tracking your search results, you will not know. Here are some things to track:

• What queries people are searching for?
• Are users clicking on the results or are they not finding what they are looking for?
• Which results are the users clicking on? If they tend to not click on the first few results, then your results need to be reorganized.

Luckily you don’t have to build a solution to do this for you. There are already software programs like SLI Systems that do all of this so you don’t have to manually adjust your search results.

Funnels

Most middle tier or advanced analytics solutions, such as Omniture and Google Analytics, already have funnel tracking. Although they have them, the chances are you aren’t using them.

Here are some funnels you should be setting up:

• Check out process – track all of the steps users are taking from your website, from adding a product to their cart, to checking out.
• Registration process – if you tend to have repeat shoppers you probably have a registration process. Make sure you have a funnel in place on your registration process so you can maximize your new user registrations.

Form Fields

From registration pages to check out pages, the most important pages on your ecommerce website have form fields. You don’t want to track what users are inputting in them, such as credit card data, because that maybe breeching some privacy laws. But what you do want to do is track the drop out rates on your form fields. This will help you figure out how to layout your form fields on the page as well as figure out which fields you really need and which ones you don’t.

Similar to setting a funnel, tracking form fields is all about getting drop out rate information. Software services like Crazy Egg, Click Density, and Click Tale can help you track your form fields.

Repeat Customers

Most analytical solutions tell you how many repeat visitors you have, but they don’t tell you how many repeat customers you have. Make sure you know who is shopping on your website on a regular basis. This way you can analyze how those visitors first came to your website and what you can do to try and get more of those type of visitors.

One other thing that you can do, which has been very effective, is to survey those users. Find out what they like or dislike with your site and improve it based on their feedback. Once they are done with their survey make sure you give them some sort of coupon, such as 5% off their next purchase.

And for the customers that tend to never shop again, consider surveying them as well. Find out why they aren’t coming back to your website and what you can do to change that. Once they are done with the survey offer them a coupon to your website, which should also helps increase your repeat customers.

Groupings

If you have thousands of products on your website, it can get difficult to track which ones are doing well and which ones aren’t. One thing that you should do is group your products together on the backend of your website, so you can get and understanding of what type of products are selling and which ones aren’t.

For example, Zappos sells shoes. So if they want to figure out how to improve their sales they can group their products together based on similarities. If they wanted to compare their sales numbers, they could compare all of their Nike men’s running shoes to Nike men’s basketball shoes. If they see that their basketball shoes are under performing they can try and promote them harder by doing some sort of basketball shoe sale.

To get on a granular level, you can even group men’s shoes by sizes to figure out how different sizes stack up against each other. This will give you an idea of what people order the most and what under performing sizes you may want to run sales for. This way when you have sales, you wouldn’t offer your most popular sizes in them because they tend to sell by themselves.

Conclusion

When you are tracking different actions on your website, concentrate on the ones that can give you actionable data. Tracking time on website doesn’t do much for you because that number Omniture and Google Analytics won’t give you insight on how you can improve it.

For each ecommerce site, there are going to be different things that could be tracked. These are just 5 things that I feel all ecommerce sites should track. What do you think?

1. Roll it out little by little
   Today’s sophisticated analytics packages allow you to track dozens and sometimes even hundreds of different metrics. While this can be very helpful, it is only frustrating and overwhelming if you are new to analytics. Early on, ignore these advanced tracking options in favor of just a few–say, page views, conversions, and visitor value. These are the numbers that truly matter, and getting a feel for regularly testing them will prepare you to track more metrics in the future.

2. Focus on dollars, not percentages
   It is very easy to get caught up in tracking things that are only indirectly related to your bottom line. Click-through rate (CTR) is a prime example of this. While it is obviously desirable to have a high CTR, it only matters if those hoards of people who click actually buy something, sign up, or otherwise act in the way you are hoping they will. Put another way, a 20% CTR doesn’t matter if your conversions are persistently stagnant. When making analytics-related decisions, place more of your attention on dollars (conversions, Visitor Value) and less on percentages (page view, CTR.).

3. Rank each metric in terms of importance to your specific goals
   It is a mistake to think that masters of web analytics have somehow figured out how to track every single metric with equal effort and stay on top of it all. In fact, the opposite is true. The true analytics pros know which metrics matter to their unique website(s) and relentlessly exclude the others from consideration. For example, if you are running a lead generation website, your important metrics are probably page views and opt-in rate. While others may yield helpful insights, you can safely ignore most of them and bias your time and energy into those relatively few that matter most.

   Remember: a jack of all trades is a master of none.

4. Use an analytics package with visualization
   Let’s face it–not everyone is of a mind to crawl over a dense spreadsheet of numbers and draw useful conclusions from them. Luckily, there are packages that visually illustrate your analytics data by laying them over your web pages. Your options include CrazyEgg, ClickTale and UserFly. If you are not a numbers person, these and similar packages will make analytics much simpler!

5. Look for benchmarks specific to your industry or niche
   There is no such thing as a “good” conversion rate, Visitor Value, or any other metric that applies to all markets. Rather, this depends on the industry or niche you are in. For example, Clickz.com and the Fireclicks Index maintain regularly updated charts of optimal CTRs according to industry. Whenever possible, consult these benchmarks and make the goal of your analytics tracking to meet and surpass them.

Here are the last 4 factors to examine as well as some ways to improve your website based upon your metrics:

5. Value Per Visit

   One of the toughest things we’ve come across when working with certain websites is helping them to create the right amount of value. When we look at metrics on websites that are designed for sales or lead conversion, the first two things that must be asked are:

   1. Is there an easy path to create value?
   2. Are there too many ways to convert?

   Forcing people to jump through hoops on a website is the biggest deterrent to generating a value from visitors. For leads, the form should be either on all of the pages or no more than a click away. For sales, keep it as simple as possible for them to buy something. Long forms for informational purposes that are not necessary for the sale should come after the purchase is made. Too often, websites start gathering data about people before they’re able to make the purchase and force some to not make the purchase at all.

   The other problem with many websites that don’t convert is that they offer too many ways to convert on every page. Simple is better. It’s good to offer value from different directions to attract those interested in different aspects of a website, company, or product, but information overload can drive people away.

6. Cost Per Conversion

   Cost per conversion is controllable and is perhaps the most important number to consider. There are many sources of traffic–search engines, social media, paid advertising, offline advertising–and determining the effectiveness of each source is the best way to adjust the cost of conversion.

   Leads, for example, can be considered conversions for some websites. In most verticals, there
   are 3^rd party lead providers who sell on a per-lead basis. It is easy to know that a lead from these sources costs $X, but knowing what your website’s cost per conversion is will help you determine how to allocate your budget. If you pay $25 for a 3^rd party lead and the cost per conversion on your website through SEO, SMM, and PPC comes to $20 per lead, it would make sense to consider spending less on buying leads and focus more on marketing your website itself.

7. Bounce Rate

   Knowing your bounce rate as a base is important, but tracking it after changes is the key to understanding your target audience and your website’s performance. Depending on your traffic, one-month intervals is standard when examining bounce rate fluctuations.

   Once you start tracking metrics, take note of your bounce rate. Make a change or two to your site or pages with high bounce rates. A month later, check the results. Did it improve or reduce the rate? There are several other factors to consider, but if there isn’t a high percentage of change in the types of sources, than the changes in bounce rate can help determine if you website changes were positive or not.

   Bounce rate must be intelligently weighted to be an effective indicator. For example, if you have a surge of social media traffic to your site (e.g. Digg front page) then your bounce rate will be higher than if the traffic is coming strictly from search engines. The other important factor is over-changing–improving on conversions and interactions are difficult to understand if several changes are made to a website or landing page every month. If you redo the website completely, there is no way to know which change worked and which was ineffective. Make measurable changes to your site, preferably one at a time, and see how that affects your bounce, and always be ready to revert back to a previous version if the changes have a negative effect.

8. Exit Pages

   When people leave your website without converting, the question must be “Why?” If they are leaving from particular pages more often than others, there’s a good chance that something is wrong with the page. Noting the exit pages makes it easier to determine where changes are needed. Visitors will follow a path that you lay out for them. If they deviate from that path before converting, you must know where and why they’re leaving.

Pleasing existing users is a lot more important than you might think because annoyed users don’t just leave, they complain–to their friends, family, and colleagues, who then have a bad impression of your website. Perhaps you should start devoting as much time and energy to keeping your existing users happy as you do to finding new ones.

If your users aren’t complaining already, here are some things that might tick them off in the future:

1. Pop-ups, pop-unders, or anything else that pops

   If anything has remained constant from the Internet’s dawning day until now, it’s that everyone hates pop-ups. Whether they’re pop-up advertisements, pop-up forms, pop-up reminders, or “helpful” alerts really makes no difference. The fact that they popped up in front of what the user really cares about and was trying to look at has always been, and always will be, annoying. You can try to rationalize it away, but no amount of wishing or hoping will change that fact. If you’re running pop-ups on your website, you can be certain that they are driving users away.

   A common objection to this is “but if we don’t pop it in front of them, they wont see what we have to say, or care!” But here’s the reality: if people don’t care about what you’re saying, the problem is with what you’re saying, not how you display it. If users don’t care when it’s written on a sidebar or in a blog post, they most certainly wont respond positively when it interrupts them by popping up in front of their faces.

2. Slow load times

   Back when AOL and dial-up were the norm, you could get away with a slow-loading website. No one expected visiting a website to be instantaneous. But times have changed–people don’t wait for websites to load anymore. If your site takes too long to load, users will simply visit a similar site with better load times.

   There are many ways to make your website load faster. One is to code your HTML in such a way that images load little by little rather than making the user wait until they are fully loaded before they can see the rest of the page (this includes advertising). MLBTradeRumors.com is a textbook example of this. Excellent blog, tons of users, but on many computers, slow load times. Why? The ads don’t let you see the rest of the site until they are fully loaded. Don’t let this happen to your website. Try visiting it from multiple computers and Internet connections to see how it loads on computers other than yours. Then get to work fixing the weak spots.

   For more tips on making your website load faster, see 10 Easy Steps to Great Website Optimization.

3. Confusing navigation

   For all that Web 2.0 has brought in terms of simplicity, it’s amazing how many websites are still hard to navigate. How many times have you gone looking for something on a website (something you knew was there), came up empty, and concluded “ah, screw it! I’ll just Google it and find it that way.” (Trust us, we’ve been there.) Well guess what? You might do that, but most people are not that patient. If they can’t find what they want using the links and buttons on your website, you’ve lost them. There is simply no excuse not to have simple navigation in 2009. Pick up a copy of “Don’t Make Me Think” and make your website easier to navigate.

4. Obnoxious, screen-covering ads

   It’s tough imagining anything more annoying than pop-ups, but leave it to advertisers to find a way. There is nothing worse than getting absorbed in an article or blog post and scrolling down only to see a massive ad fold out to cover everything you’re reading. As if that weren’t bad enough, many of these ads make you hunt and search for the “Close” box. The worst offenders even play audio as part of the ad. Ugh! Webmasters, listen up–there isn’t a user on the face of the Earth who doesn’t want to throw her monitor out the window when those ads unfold. They annoy everyone. We realize that you need to make money from your website, but there are ways of doing so that don’t completely frustrate the people who go there.

5. Intimidating walls of text

   It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of writing content. We like to imagine that users will painstakingly read each word, taking their time and spending as long as it takes to extract the meaning we left for them. Unfortunately, our imagination is the only place this ever happens. The Web 2.0 generation is also the quick fix generation, the instant pancake mix generation, the fast food generation, etc. We skim, scan, and glance–anything but read. In that sense, websites are really much more like billboards than books or magazines. Trying to fight this is as pointless as trying to fight gravity. Better to follow Steve Krug’s advice: “If they’re going to treat websites like billboards, then design great billboards.”

   In practice, this means dividing up your content into easily digestible, bite-sized chunks. This means lots of subheaders, bulleted lists, short paragraphs, and moderate use of bold and italics to break up the monotony.

6. Broken links

   Do you want people to see you as unprofessional, lazy, and behind the times? It’s rather easy! Just allow your articles and blog posts to become cluttered with broken links. That way, when your users click on a link they wanted to see and it goes nowhere, you can annoy them when they are most interested. Wait, what’s that? You say you don’t want to annoy your users this way? Good! It’s good practice to manually check links in your blog posts before you push them live, however, there are also several free tools that can help you check for and find broken links much faster. If you’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can use their crawl errors feature to help you locate the source URL for “Not found” errors (these sources can be internal or external). There is also the W3C Link Checker that will crawl your site and report broken links as well as Dead-Links.com that will splits its report up into internal and external links and then provides you with a list of errors.

7. Required log-in

   No one visits a site because they want to log in–they visit because they’re interested in the content (news, information, video, etc.) of that website. Now, we realize there are exceptions to this rule (Facebook doesn’t seem to be suffering because they force people to log in)–sometimes people need to log in; there may be no other way. However, if you’re just starting out, forcing people to log in is just another source of friction and annoyance. It may not completely kill your website, but it will certainly annoy some people enough to leave.

Now that you’ve read this article, it’s time to take a good, hard, honest look at your website. How many of these things are you currently doing? How many users are you driving into the arms of less-annoying competitors? Don’t let these perfectly correctable mistakes drag your website under–fix them!

However, once you’re familiar with what to track, the question then becomes, “How do we use these metrics to make improvements on our site?” The following tips will answer just that:

1. Traffic Sources

   After you’ve identified where your traffic is coming from, it is important to determine 2 things:

   1. How do we increase traffic from the sources that we currently have?
   2. How do we get more sources sending traffic to our site?

   Direct traffic comes in three forms. The first is random type-in traffic, where people “take a chance” and type in a URL hoping that it will deliver their desired results. The increased popularity of search engines has made random type-in traffic almost non-existent and there is no valid way to increase it effectively.

   Type-in traffic by itself can be enhanced through offline advertising–television, radio, print, and billboards offer ways to increase direct traffic, but the ROI is usually minimal compared to other forms of Internet marketing. For the sake of cost-effectiveness, direct traffic is a bonus and should not require effort to increase.

   Search traffic, on the other hand, can have a high yield for limited budgets. There are two ways to increase search traffic: search engine optimization for organic rankings and pay-per-click search engine marketing for sponsored rankings.

   Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving a website’s onsite attributes to be more attractive to search engines for particular keywords. It is supplemented by link-building, which is having links to your site from other websites, preferably with contextual anchor-text associated with the link. If the right keywords are selected and a strong firm is optimizing the site properly, SEO can often yield the most “bang for your buck.”

   Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing (PPC SEM) is an alternative that works more quickly than SEO but has less of a long-term benefit. Because you are paying per click on your sponsored link, it can often be more expensive than SEO. The advantage is control. By controlling your budget and choosing the right keywords, you have the ability to rank for as many keywords as you can afford.

   Referral traffic is often the most difficult to increase, but it can be the fastest way to get bursts of traffic. Social media sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon offer two ways to increase referral traffic. Quality content that becomes popular on these sites can generate bursts in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. From there, other site owners can see the content and link to it as well, driving more traffic from relevant sites in your niche.

   Beyond that, there are link exchanges, exposure on other sites because the content is worthy, and widgets that can drive referral traffic. The key to converting this traffic is quality of content. If the content is interesting or useful, websites will link to it if they find it. Using social media is the most convenient way, but the content itself, regardless of quality. may not be enough for social media exposure. For most sites, a quality submitter is required to draw the initial burst of attention. Once people see it with votes, the quality can help propel it to the top and help it to achieve viral status by hitting the front pages.

2. New/Unique Visitor Conversion

   Getting people to your site for the first time is important, but if you can’t keep them there, they won’t convert. Design and functionality are keys to making sure that you get the most out of your visitors. By design, we do not necessarily mean making the most beautiful site. It should be attractive enough to not drive them away, but a site that is flash-heavy or overly stylish can turn people off as much as one that is amateurish and boring. Think “clean and effective” when designing or redesigning websites. People do not get “wowed” anymore by intricate and complicated web design. They want what they want, and they better be able to find it quickly without much noise.

   Functionality is the second factor in retaining first-time visitors. Websites need to keep conversion in mind and shorten the path to conversion whenever possible. A goal-oriented web design is more impressive than a website that forces people to search around or jump through hoops to convert. If a site is easy to navigate, first time visitors are not only more inclined to become return visitors, but they are also more likely to convert into leads or sales.

3. Return Visitor Conversion

   To get people to return, they have to have an incentive. For whatever reason, a first time visitor who doesn’t convert needs to have a reason and a method to return later.

   There are many reasons that people will return to a website. Updates to a website through blog posts, updated video content, or future specials can encourage returns. Resources, however, are the best way to keep people coming back. For example, an automotive website that has a purchase vs. lease payment calculator can compel people to bookmark the site for future use. As with just about every page of your website, resource pages should have some method to convert that visitor, whether it’s a simple contact form or a link to a conversion page.

   Having reasons for people to return is important, but just as important is having methods for people to get the updates. Offering email updates can work if handled properly. Allowing visitors to subscribe to an RSS feed of the site’s blog is also effective. Bookmarking tools have worked in the past, but are slowly becoming less valuable because of browser-based tools for sites like Delicious. Still, it doesn’t hurt to have something on the pages to encourage bookmarks.

4. Interactions Per Visit

   If people are not interacting with your site, they are likely not seeing the value in it. The longer they spend on the site, the more likely they are to convert. To get them to spend more time and see more pages, all it takes is giving them the ways and the reasons.

   Watch your metrics. If a page is linked to from the homepage but it is not receiving much traffic compared to other links, consider moving the link or changing the link format. People normally “travel” a website in an “F” shaped pattern. They scan the top horizontal bar, then the mid-horizontal bar, then they return to the top left and scan down. Those who are aware of this often put their lead conversion tools on the left side or across the top. Depending on your website and goals, this may be the right strategy, but it probably isn’t.

   For most websites, the goal is to get them to trust the site, then convert. Use the “F” to build that trust. Prove your authority and professionalism in the “F”, then give them a reason to scan the page for more. Convert on the right sidebar, in the body itself, and/or along the bottom.

There is no set formula to make a website more engaging and converting. If you can, play around. Try it for a month, then move 1 button or link that is not converting as well. Do not do massive changes when doing this so you can have accurate data based upon individual changes. With that data, you can shift the site into its peak converting state over time.

Next week, we will explore the other 4 metrics. For now, apply what you’ve learned here and make a plan about what you can do to make your site the best it can be.

There are hundreds of different ways you can increase retention and conversions, but before you do that, you have to figure out what metrics you should be trying to improve.

To that end, here’s a cheat sheet that will help you determine the most important metrics to track:

1. Traffic Sources
   It is important to have a diverse number of sources for incoming traffic. The three primary source categories are:
   1. direct visitors – the ones that visit your site by directly typing your url in their browser address bar,
   2. search visitors – the ones that visit your site based on a search query, and
   3. referral visitors – the ones that visit your site because it was mentioned on another blog or site.

   All three sources are important but have varying levels of conversion, so you should calculate how much each traffic source is converting and deal with them individually.

2. New/Unique Visitor Conversion
   The way a first-time visitor interacts with your site is very different from how a returning visitor interacts. To improve first-time visitors conversions you have to isolate it from the conversion rates of your loyal or returning customers and determine what they see when they visit the website for the first time and how you can improve that experience. Usability plays an important role in reducing the bounce rate for first timers.
3. Return Visitor Conversion
   There are two questions you should be asking yourself. 1) Why did the person return, and 2) did the person convert the first time around, and if they didn’t, why not and how can you convert them the second time around. Keep in mind, even if someone didn’t convert as a new visitor, you made enough of an impression to get them to come back. Now that they have liked you enough to return, your goal is to isolate the return visitor conversion rate and figure out how to increase that.
4. Interactions Per Visit
   Even if your visitors don’t convert, it is important to monitor their behavior on the site. What exactly are they doing, how can you get them to do more of it, and how can you influence this behavior into conversions? For example, what are your page view rates per unique visitors, what is the time spent, comments or reviews made, and so on. Each of these interactions is important, and your goal should be not only to increase these interactions (e.g. increase time spent on the site), but also figure out how you can leverage these increased interactions into increased conversions (which might be downloads, subscriptions, purchases, etc.).
5. Value Per Visit
   The value of a visit is tied directly to the interactions per visit. You can calculate this simply as number of visits divided by total value created. Calculating value per visit is difficult because there are many intangibles involved that create value that is hard to define. For example, blog visitors create value every time they add a page view to your traffic (because of cpm advertising) but they also create an intangible value when they comment on your site. Similarly, visitors on e-commerce sites create value every time they purchase a product, but they also create a somewhat incalculable value when they leave a product review or when they spread word of mouth.
6. Cost Per Conversion
   The corollary to value per visit, and one of the most important metrics, is cost per conversion (alternatively: lead generation costs or cost per referral). It doesn’t matter if you have high conversions and high value per visit if your costs are so prohibitive that your net income is zero or even negative. While trying to increase conversion, keep your costs per conversion and overall margins in mind.
7. Bounce Rate
   Your initial goal when trying to increase all five of the metrics above is to minimize your visitor bounce rate. The Bounce rate is the rate at which new visitors visit your site and immediately click away without doing anything (very low time spent and no interactions). A high bounce rate can mean several things, including weak or irrelevant sources of traffic and landing pages that aren’t optimized for conversion (have a poor design, low usability or high load times). Bounce rates for e-commerce sites are often called abandonment rates, i.e., the rate at which people abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase. This is usually a result of an overly complicated checkout process, expired deals, forced cart additions (e.g. to see the actual price of the product, add to your cart), and so on.
8. Exit Pages
   Your bounce rates aren’t entirely derived from your home page. In many cases your final call to action or conversion may be on page 2 or 3 of a process. To maximize conversions you need to dive deeper into your exits and figure out at what stage in the process your visitors are exiting the site or abandoning their shopping cart, and optimize the process accordingly.

Start monitoring all these metrics now, and next time we’ll tell you how to optimize each of them.

For Beginners

The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 – A series of detailed posts walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports – This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

Tips & Tricks

If you’re already fairly familiar with Google Analytics and you’re ready to dig deeper and learn more about how to make use of the information that is available to you with Google Analytics, this list of tips & tricks is for you.

7. Google Analytics Tips for SEO – This posts looks at how to use some of Googles new features for Search Engine Optimization.
8. 8 Useful Google Analytics Tips – This is a great list of tips for someone who has been using Google Analytics and is ready to take it to the next level and/or overcome some of its shortcomings.
9. Web Analytics Demystified – While this post isn’t about Google Analytics specifically, it is a great primer on understanding how to use the data presented by Google Analytics and it uses examples and screenshots from Google Analytics for many of the descriptions.
10. You Cut Quite a Profile – A guest post on the Google Analytics Blog about how to set up multiple profiles in order to filter down certain segments of your data.
11. 5 tips for using Google Analytics – A quick set of tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.
12. 3 Quick Tips to Tag and Track with Google Analytics – A great post on how to segment, track, and tag site visitors.
13. Google Analytics Tagging Demystified – A how-to post on the use of tagging in Google Analytics.
14. 5 tips for getting the most out of Google Analytics – Another quick set of tips for getting more out Google Analytics.
15. Get the most out of your Google Analytics – This post gives you an overall idea of what Google Analytics can tell you by asking some simple questions and showing you how Google Analytics can help you answer them.
16. Getting More out of Google Analytics Goals – A post on the importance of setting up goals in Google Analytics and how to do it.
17. Goal Setting Example with Google Analytics – Another post on setting goals in Google Analytics.
18. Getting the most out of Search Log Analysis and Google Analytics – A post that explains what “Search analytics”, search log analysis and clickstream analysis are and why they are so important.
19. How to analyze results in Google Analytics – As the title suggest this post looks at how to analyze the data that Google Analytics provides.
20. Top Tips for Using Google Analytics – Another quick set of tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.
21. Google Analytics Tutorials: All Together – A list of several video tutorials that include some of the more advanced features of Google Analytics.
22. Google Analytics Tip: Learn How They Found That 1 Page – This post will tell you how to find out how visitors found a single page on your site, which can be useful for figuring out why traffic on your site may have spiked on a certain day, for example.
23. Install Google Analytics Site Search In 5 Steps – This post shows you how to set up the Site Search feature in Google Analytics, which will allow you to analyze your internal search phrases as opposed to those from search engines.
24. Google Analytics Site Search: Working with the Data – A follow up to the above post that explains the data from your internal site searches.
25. Google Analytics Videos on YouTube – A list of official Google Analytics videos that are on YouTube from the Google Analytics Blog.
26. Advanced Use of Google Analytics and the new interface – A great post about some of the more advanced uses of Google Analytics.
27. Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2 – A follow up to the above post that answers questions posed to the author.
28. Tracking social networks with Google Analytics using filters – This post shows you how to set up a filter that will allow you to look at visits from various social networks.
29. The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips – A long list of Google Analytics tips and tricks.
30. Advanced Google Analytics: Conversion Goals (Part One) – This is the first in a series of posts about advanced uses of Google Analytics. This post covers how to setup and define goals.
31. Advanced Google Analytics: Conversion Goals (Part Two) – This second post shows you how to set up funnels in Google Analytics.
32. Advanced Google Analytics: Conversion Goals (Part Three) – This third post explains how to track “things that don’t have a distinct page view associated with them.”

Plugins, Hacks & Additions

Want to learn how to get even more out of and extend Google Analytics by extending it with third party plugins, additions and hacks? This list of links is for you.

33. The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks and Tips Collection – A long list of links and descriptions regarding ways you can get more out of Google Analytics.
34. Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links – Shows you how to use MooTools to track clicks on links to other sites from your site.
35. Use jQuery with Google Analytics to Track Clicks on Outgoing Links From Your Site – Shows you how to use jQuery to track clicks on links to other sites from your site.
36. 4 Tools to Get More from your Google Analytics – A list of 4 scripts that can be used to enhance Google Analytics using the GreaseMonkey Firefox extension.
37. How to track downloads in Google Analytics automatically – A post on how to track links to documents and outbound links.
38. Google Analytics on iPhone – Shows you how to get your Google Analytics data to display on your iPhone using an web-based application in development by a German developer named Sergej Mueller.
39. 7 Google Analytics Plug Ins & Reports You Probably Didn’t Know About – Links to scripts, plugins and reports gleaned from a Google event that the author attended.
40. Google Analytics for WordPress – A plugin for adding Google Analytics to your WordPress blog.

New & Advanced Features

In October 2008 Google started to release enterprise-class features to Google Analytics. Some of these features include Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports and Motion Charts. In November 2008 Google also announced a simplified solution for tracking Flash content. The links below will introduce you to these features and show you how you can use them.

41. More Enterprise-Class Features Added To Google Analytics – A post from the Google Analytics Blog that introduces the enterprise-class features that were added to Google Analytics in October 2008.
42. Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja! – A very detailed post on how to use the new Advanced Segmentation features in Google Analytics.
43. Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation: The Allegory of the Cave – Describes the new Advanced Segmentation features through Socrates The Allegory of the Cave.
44. A deeper look at Advanced Segmentation – Another detailed post about the new Advanced Segmentation features directly from the Google Analytics Blog.
45. The new features are now available in your account! Let’s take a deeper look, starting with Motion Charts – The Google Analytics Blog takes a detailed look at the new Motion Charts feature in Google Analytics.
46. Motion Charts in Google Analytics – A video presentation demonstrating the new Motion Charts feature.
47. Google Analytics Benchmarking: Tutorial, and Things that Make You Go Hmmmmm… – A humorous, yet very useful post on how to set up and use Google Analytics Benchmarking feature.
48. Make a date with data in Google Analytics – While not yet fully implemented, Google has integrated Google AdSense data into Google Analytics and this post from the Google AdSense Blog describes this new feature.
49. Google AdSense Reports to Appear in Google Analytics – A series of screenshots showing Google AdSense data that has been integrated into Google Analytics. This was posted when there was still some speculation around Google releasing this feature, but the screenshots show you what this new feature looks like.
50. Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can! – Here is the announcement from the Google Analytics Blog regarding the simplified solution for tracking Flash content that they released in November 2008.

1. How do you stack up with your competition?

Through the benchmarking screen you are able to compare your traffic stats with your competition. Of course, this data isn’t 100% accurate because all of your competitors may not be using Google Analytics, but it’s better than nothing.

You may already have a good understanding of whether your website receives more or less traffic than your competition, but do you know how engaged your visitors are compared to your competition? By comparing stats like average time on site you will get a better idea of how you stack up against your competition and where you need to make changes to start improving your website.

2. Where in the world are you?

Using the map overlay feature in the country view is usually useless and doesn’t provide much insight about your visitors, however, drilling down to the city level might give you more useful information about your audience. For example, just because your business is based in the U.S. doesn’t mean that most of your traffic is coming from a U.S. city—the majority of your traffic could be coming from London. Once you dissect the geo data and have an idea of where the majority of your audience is located, you can then modify your business to better suit these specific audiences.

3. Window shoppers VS returning customers

If your product or service is only bought once by a customer and you never see them again, then your goal would be to get more new visitors into your website. If you are looking for repeat business then your goal may be to increase your returning visitor count. One good way to do this is by using cookies or referrer information that will allow you to display custom options to different types of visitors.

4. First impressions are the most important

Getting more traffic to your website is one way to increase your sales, but another way would be to control how many people leave your website. If people aren’t staying, you may want to modify your website design or product offering so that it is more attractive. This is usually the easiest way to increase your revenue.

5. Are you compatible?

You may be an advanced computer user, but your customers may not. By finding out which web browsers your customers are using, you will be able to determine if your website is compatible with those browsers. If 30% of your visitors are using Firefox, but your website isn’t compatible with Firefox, then you could potentially be losing a lot of business.

6. How big is your monitor?

If you flash back to 1990 people had very bulky monitors with low resolutions. Today, everybody seems to be using flat panel monitors with higher resolutions. The screen resolution section in Google Analytics allows you to see what resolution your customers are using. This is useful information because if the majority of your customers are using monitors with high resolutions (e.g. 1024×768), you may want to consider increasing the width of your website, which increases the real estate you have to fit more information on the screen. On the other hand, if your visitors tend to have lower resolutions (e.g. 800×600 and below) you want to make sure the width of your website doesn’t exceed the width used by the majority of your users so that they can easily see all the information on your website.

7. Where are visitors coming from?

Referring websites will give you a better idea of how people are getting to your website. If you suddenly get a burst of traffic from a website you have never heard of, go and check it out. See if you can get a burst of traffic from that website again.

8. Where do you rank on Google?

You may already know the keywords that drive traffic to your business, but have you tried to increase your rankings for those keywords? If you notice a keyword is driving a lot of traffic to your site and you are showing up on page 2 of Google for that term, try to get on page 1. You can usually do this through search engine optimization. Or if you want, signup for Google AdWords and start a pay per click campaign with those keywords.

9. Determining new products, services or content

Once you figure out what your visitors like and dislike, you can offer them new things that you think will interest them. Or if people like one particular item, you can offer other products, services or even content that could compliment that item. In many cases it is easier to up-sell current customers than it is to obtain new customers.

10. What causes people to leave your website?

This data will help you understand what people don’t like about your website. If people tend to frequently exit from a certain page, consider modifying it. Create better calls to action or add links to other places on your website. You could also use Google Website Optimizer to improve the performance of your web pages.

11. What are your goals?

It’s amazing how many people don’t have goals setup within their analytics account. If you don’t have goals, how do you know that you are meeting your numbers? Go out there and setup goals if you haven’t already. If you have, make sure you tie in goal data with all of your other traffic stats.