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Don Schindler

Executive Reputation Coach & Digital Marketer

Tag: google analytics (page 1 of 2)

How to fix a high bounce rate on your website

trampoline-fail-bball

People that bounce your website consider it a fail – like this.

If you have a website, you have a bounce rate. It’s inevitable that someone will find your page through a search, click the link, read the content and decide this wasn’t what they were looking for.  Instead of clicking anything on your website, they will back out, close the window or click on a link that leads to another website that is on your website.

don-schindler-website-bounce-rate

My bounce rate for the year

This is a bounce. And if you have Google Analytics running on your website, Google will let you know how many times this happens to your website.

But Google is also watching from the search engine side of the business and if you get too high of a bounce rate for a certain keyword, they won’t be showing your website for that keyword much longer.

So what can cause a high bounce rate?

1. Technical Issues

Slow page load times – if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load (and even 3 seconds is pushing it), then the bounce rate is gonna go up. People don’t have time to wait on your big image carousel (hate those things) or all those cool widgets from Facebook and Twitter that display your content.

If you want to see how fast your page loads, use GTmetrix or Pingdom and it will tell you what is taking too long.

Not being Mobile First – When it comes to where the web is going, mobile is leading the charge. There are more mobile phones than toothbrushes and it’s how the majority of us access the web, read our email and play games.

So if you website isn’t mobile-optimized (which means that it can function for the user on a mobile phone – most relevant content for a mobile user is easy to find and operate with a thumb) and responsively designed (one website that shifts size and content depending on the device accessing it) then you are going to have a high bounce rate for mobile and tablets.

Cheap crappy hosting – maybe you have a website and you decided to go with the lowest possible payment (Web Hosting for only $1.99 a month). Even with net neutrality, a crappy provider could put your website with a few hundred other small websites on one web server without a load balancer and your website gets punished for slow load times.

Loading popups – now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for an email capture pop-up after the user has been on the page for a while. But if your email capture pop-up launches the minute someone arrives at the website, that’s annoying and it can slow down the website load time.

2. Website Content

Low Quality Content – unfortunately most websites suffer from this. The content just sucks. It’s full of marketing fluff or it promises to teach you something and just doesn’t deliver. Continue reading

Why you should be using Google Webmaster Tools and how to set it up? – Simple SEO

The best things is that Google will email you when your site is having issues. This is huge.

Google Webmaster Tools emailing me

Google warned me that I was having issues back in January with my domain.

How do you know when your website is having issues with the search engine? You don’t. Google needs to tell you.

But there’s also a ton more it does. I’m just going to give you a few highlights.

 

Search Queries Reports

Since Google Analytics doesn’t give up keywords people are using to search with when they discover your  website (only if they are logged in), Google Webmaster tools will provide these search queries regardless if they are logged in or not.

The only issue is that it’s not tied specifically to their visit. 🙁

But you will find a ton of information on your keywords and landing pages like impressions, clicks, click-thru-rates and rankings.

Google Search Queries

Search Queries will tell you what keywords people used to find your website

There’s a ton of information to be found here and here’s a great article from LunaMetrics explaining a lot more of it.

You’ll also want to connect your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. It’s pretty easy to do. Just go to Acquisition -> Search Engine Optimization -> Landing Pages.

The only thing you need to worry about there is that only one account Google Webmaster Tools account can be connected to one Google Analytics account.

 

Links to your website

Continue reading

How should you set up your Google Analytics dashboard for your farm website or blog?

final-google-custom-dashboard

How do you get a snapshot Google dashboard?

I’ve been following Christopher S. Penn for years and am a big advocate for listening to his weekly podcast with John Wall called Marketing Over Coffee.

I learned how to set up a custom dashboard in Google from Chris so some of this custom dashboard set-up comes from him, a few others and my own added info. So props to Christopher for showing me how to do this so I can show you how to set up your dairy website/blog analytics?

Before you set up your Google Analytics dashboard, you really need to determine the goals of your website. If you need help with setting up Goals and Conversions, then check out my post on Setting Goals.

If you’ve never set up analytics on your website/blog, you’ll need to do that first. You can learn how to do that from Google with their setting up Google Analytics on your website post.

To build a custom dashboard, it’s fairly easily. But why would you want to, you know, since Google already provides large tabs with the analytics on them. Mainly because you probably don’t have a lot of time to be digging through all those analytics. Your own dashboard will help you get right to the meat of your needs.

1. Log in to Google Analytics

It’s as simple as going to Google.com/analytics

2. Select the profile

You might not have to select a profile if you only have one website. If you are already on the Audience Overview, just skip to Step 3.

3. Select New Dashboard

This will be on the top left navigation. You can create up to 20 custom dashboards.

audience-overview

Look at the top left navigation for Dashboard

4. Select Blank Canvas

You’ll be able to create and move all the widgets you create so the dashboard will look exactly as you want it to look.

blank-canvas

5. Select Add a Widget

Once you click, add a widget you’ll get a pop-up on the page that will help you define each and every widget you want to create.

First you’ll need to fill out the Widget’s name.

The second thing you’ll need to select is what type of widget reporting this will be. Do you want:

Metrics – just a simple figure or calculation.
Timeline – a visual timeline with metrics.
Geomap – a visual map color coded for the metrics.
Table – several metrics tied together in a table format.
Pie – a visual pie chart of the metrics.
Bar – a bar chart of the metrics.

If you select Standard, these metrics will be tied to the time slot you select on the top right.

If you select Real-Time, these metrics will be tied to only real time data and will constantly be changing depending on the real time traffic to the website.

Once you select the visual, the “show the following metric:” will change depending on the visual.

You can also use “Filter this data” to show/don’t show different dimensions with different expressions like “containing”, “exactly matching”, “ends with”, etc…

The last option, “Link to Report or URL” gives you the possibility to link directly to a standard Google Analytics report or a URL within the widget.

Then you would click “Save”.

Here are the following widgets I would set up for dairy industry or farming website. These will make it easier on you to see at a snapshot what is going on.

6. Real Time Active Visitors – how many people are on the website right now.

active-visitors

Name the widget “Active Visitors”
Select Real-time 2.1 Counter
Select Following Metric: Active Visitors
No dimension
No filter this data
No link
Click “Save”

active-visitors-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

7. Unique Visitors – how many unique people have been on the site in the timeframe at the top right

unique-visitors

Name the widget “Unique Visitors”
Select Standard 2.1 Metric
Select “Unique Visitors”
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

google-dashboard-1

The above image is what the widget should look like. As you probably noticed, this widget is then on top of the first widget you created. You can drag this widget down under the other widget by simply grabbing the top bar of the widget.

8. Unique Visitors by Source – where are my unique visitors coming from (direct, search engines, websites, etc…)

pie-unique-visitors-by-source

Name the widget “Unique Visitors by Source”
Select Standard “Pie”
Select “Unique Visitors”
Select “Source”
Show up to 5 slices
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

pie-unique-visitors-by-source-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

9. Unique Visitors by Content Page and Contact Us (Goal 1 Conversion Rates) – this will tie how many of your unique visitors visited a certain page and then also converted one of your goals

table-pages-unique-visitors-by-goal-1

Name the widget “Unique Visitors and Content Pages by Contact Us” if that is your goal.
Select Standard “Table”
Select “Page”
Select “Unique Visitors”
Select “Contact Us (Goal 1 Conversion Rate)” if this is your goal
10 rows is fine
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

table-pages-unique-visitors-by-goal-1-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

10. Unique Visitors and Average Time on Page per Keyword – this will show you how many unique visitors used what keyword to get to your website and how long they stayed on the page.

unique-visitors-avg-time-keyword-table

What does “not set” mean? Well, it’s kinda confusing but Google tries to clear it up with their explanation. To me, it’s tough to tell but basically Google is missing the dimensions it needs to determine the keyword.

What does “not provided” mean? This means that the user was logged into Google and was securing using search so the keywords are not passed along to Google Analytics. This is for privacy but you can “unlock” these keywords through these steps by KISSmetrics.

Name the widget “Unique Visitors and Avg. Time on Page per Keyword” if that is your goal.
Select Standard “Table”
Select “Keyword”
Select “Unique Visitors”
Select “Avg. Time on Page”
10 rows is fine
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

unique-visitors-avg-time-keyword-table-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

11. Contact Us (Goal 1 Conversion Rate) – this will show you how many times your goal converted.

conversion-goal-1

Name the widget “Contact Us (Goal 1 Conversion Rate)” if that is your goal.
Select Standard “2.1 Metric”
Select “Contact Us (Goal 1 Conversion Rate)”
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

conversion-goal-1-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

12. 3 min or more (Goal 2 Conversion Rate) – this will show you how many times a unique visitor stayed on the site for 3 minutes or more.

conversion-goal-2

Name the widget “3 min or more (Goal 2 Conversion Rate) ” if that is your goal.
Select Standard “2.1 Metric”
Select “3 min or more (Goal 2 Conversion Rate) ”
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

conversion-goal-2-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

13. Unique Visitors and Goal Completions – this will show in timeline form the number of unique visitors and how many times there was a goal completion.

timeline-unique-visitors-goal-completions

Name the widget ” Unique Visitors and Goal Completions”.
Select Standard “Timeline”
Select “Unique Visitors and Goal Completions”
Select “Unique Visitors”
Select “Goal Completions”
No filter
No link
Click “Save”

timeline-unique-visitors-goal-completions-complete

The above image is what the widget should look like.

There you go – eight different graphs to quickly view how your website is doing on your own personal dashboard.

final-google-custom-dashboard

How do you get a snapshot Google dashboard?

And of course, if these don’t meet your needs you can add many more widgets customized to your specifications.

In a future post, I’ll go over the main sections of Google Analytics that are important to dive into as well like Content – All Pages and Landing Pages.

And I’ll also look into custom reports – there are many good ones out there that other people have created – and how to add them as well.

If you have any questions, or want to add your own, just let me know by leaving comments below or contact me via your favorite social net.  All my connections are on the right.

How do you set up a goal in Google Analytics? – Simple SEO

So what’s the best way to set up and use Google Analytics to get more out of your website? Answer one important question and you can be well on your way to understanding more about how your website is working for you and how to adjust it for the future.

Why does your website exist?

If you say, “because people need to find us on the web.” Well, they can do that if you use Facebook, or Twitter or Linkedin.

No, I think your website was meant for more. I consider a website my home base on the web or my “death star.” I have full control (and it is always under construction) and no social network founder can change how it functions for me for the betterment of users.

If I have full control, then I should be able to put up a “Call To Action” on the website, and be able to measure if it is being successful for me. Whether the call to action is getting their email or selling a product.

Now that I know what my goal of the website is – getting their email or getting them to buy my product – then I can set up a goal inside of Google Analytics to be able to track the success of my goal.

How do you set up a goal in Google Analytics?

google-analytics-select-website

First, go into GA and select your website.

First make sure you have added Google Analytics to your website.  If you have, then it will appear in the list here when you log in.  If you haven’t added Google Analytics to your website, here’s a post on how to add GA to your website.

Select your website and then select the button at the top called Admin.

google-analytics-select-goals

Select Admin at the top right – then you should see Goals on the bottom right hand list.

Then on the bottom right hand list (there should be three columns), you will see “Goals”.  Click on this.

google-analytics-create-goal

Click on “Create A Goal”.

Once you are on the Goals page, you can create up to 4 goal sets with up to 5 goals per set for a total of 20. – You can’t delete a goal so don’t just create them willie-nillie.  You can adjust goals as well.

You’ll want a mix of both your macro goals (large goals – capture email, buy stuff) and micro goals (smaller calls to action – watch a video, download an info graphic, share on social media).

You can set up for a destination – specific web page.
You can set up for duration – a time on site.
You can set up for pages/screens per visit.
You can set up for a specific event to happen – watch a video or download an ebook or share on social media.

google-analytics-goal-detail

This is a destination goal – I want to track after people sign up for email.

Once you have some goals set up – if you can put a money value to these goals all the better but that takes knowing what an email is worth acquiring – then you can actually start measuring how your website is performing.  We’ll go over the Google Analytics dashboard and which reports are worth watching and making adjustments for in upcoming posts.

Do you have any favorite goals for your website?

Set up Google Analytics on your ND WordPress Blog

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free!

Lots of people have asked about website analytics on the Notre Dame blog system.  Here’s a quick way to set it up for yourself.  The main thing you need to know is that you’ll need a Google Account first.  So if you don’t have one, set that up first.  Then follow the steps below.

  1. Go to google.com/analytics
  2. Click on Access Analytics
  3. Login using your Google Account email/password
  4. Click on the little gear to the far right.  Check out the image below to see where it is.

    Add New Account to Google Analytics

    You'll see this image after you click the Google Analytics Gear

  5. In the center will be a Add New Account – click that.
  6. Fill out the info like Your Blog Name, the website address, change the time to Eastern, let it share data to other Google products, and check the Terms and Conditions. Continue reading
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