Use Web Analytics to Focus on Pages Per Visit and Bounce Rate

Web analytics are essential to understanding and attracting more visitors — and figuring out ways to get those visitors to come back again.
The three main standards for Web analytics are unique visitors, visits and page views. Those three metrics are usually the most prominently displayed in audience software such as Google Analytics.

The unique visitor number of course reveals the size of the audience. The visit number, which is always larger than the uniques number, shows which ones come back again. Page views is an indicator of how much of the site they consume.
Two related and important metrics are pages per visit and bounce rate, which is the focus of this article.

Why Pages Per Visit is So Important

Dividing page views by visits will provide pages per visit, a number that is even more revealing than simply uniques, visits and page views.

Pages per visit and time per visit are very much related for obvious reasons. PPV says a great deal about the quality of the product.

• Download speed
• Usefulness of the content
• Prominence and relevance of related links
• Attractiveness of design and graphics

Large sites and sites that emphasize any kind of search tend to have higher pages per visit.
I have worked on news media sites that have a PPV upwards of six to seven and higher and have also seen sites that average less than two.
Sites with a strong brand — a name that is memorable and content that has ongoing usefulness — will get higher PPV.
Sites in categories with high competition like online marketing blogs (such as this one) tend to get lower numbers.

… Which Leads Us to Bounce Rate

In Google Analytics, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to any page, usually from a search engine, and leave again without clicking on any other page.

Pages per visit is a measure of overall site use, while bounce rate measures the performance of an individual page.
Knowing the bounce rate of key pages makes it easier to zero in on problem pages to figure out how to make them more clickable.

“Improving the bounce rate of the most popular pages will clearly improve overall site performance.”

An easy way to approach bounce rate is by looking at the bounce rates of the 10 most popular pages on a site.
Improving the bounce rate of the most popular pages will clearly improve overall site performance.
Over the 30 days prior to this writing, the most popular page on one of my sites had a bounce rate of 22 percent, the second most popular had a rate of 25 percent and, unfortunately, the third most popular had a rate of 72 percent.
My efforts to improve bounce rates on individual pages has paid off, but not in all cases. Some seem to resist the efforts no matter how much effort and experimenting go into them while others improve quickly.

By Scott Bateman
http://www.promisemedia.com/