By One of the biggest struggles most internet marketers face is getting high quality traffic to their websites. Traffic itself isn’t the issue, you can get a ton of traffic very cheaply without any skill.
But, getting high quality traffic that converts at a cost where you are still making a profit. That’s a completely different ball game and much harder.
When you start considering buying traffic you need to also look at how you’re going to track and optimise it. This means doing split-tests on different elements of your landing page.
This is all very important for paid traffic, and we’ll look at how you can get started in another post. But today I want to share with you something that most marketers ignore.
I’ve lost count of the times when someone has asked me how they can get more traffic to their website and the first question I ask them is…
Have you checked your analytics to see if your maximising your current visitors?
It’s a fact that 99% of website owners look to buy traffic to their website before they look to see what their current visitors are doing!
You want to go into your Google Analytics account for your website, and if you haven’t got one setup then get it setup right now here, and check:
- Bounce Rate
- Pages Most Visited
- Bounce Rate On Each Of Those Pages
And then you want to go to the pages and check them out. But more on that in a minute.
First of all let’s take a look in our analytics account. I’m going to use one of our websites as an example.
Starting on the homepage you get an overview of your sites stats for the last month.
Let’s take a look at one of my websites we can see that on average each person visits 3.70. The sites average bounce rate is just 0.42% and readers spend an average of 1 minute and 26 seconds on the site. The time spent on the site per visit is quite low because this sites primary content is daily tips and news which are short but regular throughout the day.
Now, in the left hand column of your analytics account, select Behaviour and then Site Content > All Pages.
This page tells us information about the individual pages on our site over the last month. By default we see the top ten most visited pages on the first page.
The first thing to notice is that the number one page is /. That means the websites homepage and, in my experience, the homepage is almost always the most visited page on a website. And by a significant amount.
On this website you can see that the homepage accounts for 4.41% of all the visitors to the website. Although this may not sound like a lot, the next most visited page received only 1.89%. That means that the homepage gets 2.52% more of the sites visitors than the next most visited page!
So let’s take a closer look at the homepage stats.
Visitors spend an average of 27 seconds on this page, which is a bit lower than the average of 32 seconds (shown at the top of the page in the grey boxes) but nothing to get worried about.
The bounce rate is 1.24% which is a lot higher than the average of 0.42%. A bounce is someone who visits the page and then leaves without going anywhere else on your website. This is quite a lot higher than the others, but there is a good reason for it. And I’ll show you why in a moment.
12.24% of people who visit this page leave the website from there. Compared to the average of 27.05% this is very good.
Now that we know which page on our website is getting the most visitors we need to determine if it is maximising it’s use of those visitors. But, before we can do that, we need to decide what we want those visitors to do when they get to the page. It may be that we want them to…
- Opt-in to a mailing list
- Submit an enquiry form
- Purchase a product
- Learn more about our brand
- Navigate further into the website
These are just a few examples, and I’m sure you can add your own to them.
Once we’ve made the choice of what a visitor should do when they hit the most visited page on our website, we can look at optimising this page to achieve that goal.
So, going back to the reason why we have a higher bounce rate on our home page. Because this website has a lot of repeat visitors, most of them are coming to get the daily advice and tips.
The home page is designed in such a way that they can get a summary of that information the moment they land. If that days information interests a visitors, they can click through and get more information. If it doesn’t, then they leave.
But the key is…
This has been done on purpose.
We want to make sure our regular readers are well looked after and doing this gives us the best feedback and user-interaction for our readers. And doing so increases the bounce rate on the homepage because readers who don’t want that days information check the summaries and leave.
That’s fine. Because we know that our homepage is optimised for one thing…
To provide our regular readers with the best experience that we can.
So, check out:
- Your Google Analytics account
- Find out which page has the most visitors on your website
- Determine what action you want a visitor to take on that page
- Optimise your most visited web page for the action you want visitors to take
What do you think?