Oh Behave…

When visitors enter a website they do so to accomplish a goal. That goal could be to purchase, to learn, to download or to be entertained. However, even the best laid out website can have interesting results on how visitors navigate to accomplish that goal. What’s more, visitors may even search out content you never thought was important. How to find all of this ‘interesting’ data comes from conducting a User Intent Analysis.

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We landed on the Moon

July 20^th, 1969 Neil Armstrong,  Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins expected to land on the moon and that’s exactly what they did (not getting into conspiracy theories today). But what would have happened if Apollo 11 ended up on Mars instead? Neil would have pulled out his 7-iron and realized he was hitting out of a dry sand trap; may need to club up! The point is, your visitors also have expectations of where they’ll be landing, and if they bring their golf clubs, they expect to golf! This is why Landing Page Optimization is so important. You can ensure that the visitor’s experience is relevant and optimized based on ‘their’ feedback, not just ‘your’ gut instincts.

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Over the past few weeks we have discussed a few important metrics to be monitoring in your web analytics program as well as an important step to understanding visitor behavior by creating scenarios. All of that information is incredibly valuable to noticing issues, but now what?

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Web Analytics is an extremely powerful tool. It shows you insight into your website and gives you real data on where visitors come from and what they view when they get there. That information is all well and good and certainly nice to know, but what does seeing how many pageviews or visits you have really do for your site?

Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Every site has a purpose, whether it’s to sell widgets, get signups or just have people read your content. If the Conversion Rate is low, how do you know what the issue is? Maybe it’s price, maybe people just aren’t that interested, or maybe – just maybe – they can’t find the thing in the first place! Some sites only have two steps to get to their ultimate goal, so that’s pretty cut and dry to see if a page isn’t working well. However, most sites have a specific set of pages that visitors must follow in order to achieve that goal. What we need to understand is… is the flow working?
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Last week we discussed the in’s and out’s of Bounce Rate. This week we’ll take a closer look at Bounce Rate’s not so distant cousin; Exit Rate.

Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate
Before we discuss the uses of Exit Rate, it is important to denote the differences between this metric and Bounce Rate. Where Bounce Rate applies to simply those that exited from a site or page immediately after entering, Exit Rate calculates all exits, regardless of entry path, for a particular page. This means, you will most likely have two different numbers for each metric by page.

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A question we receive nearly every week in the analytics world is “What is Bounce Rate?” The follow up question is invariably “What is a good Bounce Rate?” The answer to the latter is always, “It depends.”

So what exactly is Bounce Rate?

Essentially Bounce Rate is calculated by the number of single page visits on your site divided by the total number of visitors. Single page visits are defined as a visitor entering your site and then immediately leaving your site from that page, without viewing any additional pages. This is different from Exit Rate (more next week) because Exit Rate is calculated for ALL visitors that leave the site from a specific page, not necessarily if they only viewed one page.
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