Guest post by Carmen Sutter. She’s on my team, and specializes in Web Analytics.

So you finally implemented web analytics. Now what? What metrics should you look at? What do those metrics mean? As always with questions like this the answer is: It depends. It depends on what type of site you are running. It depends on your goals for your site. It depends on the marketing around your site, if any.

Over the next couple of analytics posts we will help you explore some of the metrics you should know.

For any type of site, bounce rate is probably one of the more important metrics. The bounce rate tells you the percent of visits that only look at one page. Literally, how many people “bounce” right off your site. This is a metric you want to observe in aggregate for your entire site as well as on a page level.

There are a number of reasons for high bounce rates.

1) Maybe your content is not as fresh as it could be. Evaluate how often you update your content and see if you can improve on that and if that makes a difference in the bounce rate.

2) Maybe your site is not the site your visitors are looking for. Take a look at the search engine keywords that drive traffic to your site. Make those keyword sense for your site? Let’s say a large number of visitors come to your site via the keywords ” cookies history”. You could be a tech blog or a baking site - make sure your search listings are optimized to help potential visitors know what to expect when coming over to your site. And then evaluate if your bounce rate changed at all.

3) In sticking with the search keywords topic, the bounce rate is even more critical for your paid search campaigns. No matter if the goal for the PPC campaign is a purchase or lead generation, if your visitors don’t make it beyond one page and bounce right off your site, you are wasting money. Make a sure that your PPC campaign is targeted and brings in qualified traffic.

You’ll probably wonder what constitutes a good bounce rate and my answer, like for most metrics, is to benchmark against yourself. If you have a bounce rate of 80% today, aim for 75% next month. If you have a bounce rate of 10%, aim for 5%. We all have the tendency to want to compare against others, but there are so many factors affecting benchmark data. On the other hand, if you know what’s going on with your site, you can control the content and see how it impacts your own metrics over time.

In the next post we’ll take a look at important metrics for commerce sites.
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Carmen Sutter has extensive experience with Omniture, Google Analytics & Coremetrics. She is experienced in implementations, customizations, integration services, and Reporting & Benchmarking.

By streamlining reporting processes, performing in-depth analysis, and understanding customers’ level of engagement, Carmen helps measure and improve our search marketing campaigns.

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