I’m always happy when people return to my website: it means they liked what they saw the first time and want some more similar stuff. Keeping your returning visitors happy it’s very important.

Here are two big reasons for being so interested in the happiness of your returning visitors:

1. A returning visitor means a potential client in the future: conversions don’t happen from the first visit.
2. These people already like your website so it’s more likely they’ll tell others about your website/product/service

So, what I did is I created a Custom Report in Google Analytics that show me what Returning Visitors are viewing and other metrics, that I’ll talk about in just a minute. If you know nothing about Custom Reports you can check out my introductory article for Custom Reports and I also have an article about how to track what pages were viewed because of a keyword, using Custom Reports.

Now let’s get back to the custom report from today. Log in into your Google Analytics account and click create new custom report. Give it a suggestive name like “Happy Returning Visitors”. The thing is that you don’t have a direct metric for returning visitors. So here is what metrics you’ll choose to display and then I’ll explain why.

Metrics to choose to view: Visits, %New Visits, New Visits, Avg. Time on Page, Pages/Visit and Bounce Rate. The first dimension to apply these metrics to is Page Title. As optional drill down dimensions chose Visitor Type and Source/Medium.

Here is how to look at this custom report: you’ll basically look at the pages that have the less percentage of New Visitors. Click on that link and from the new table choose Returning Visitors. Now you’ll see how the Returning Visitors chose to return to your website (the source and the medium), the bounce rate, how many pages they saw and what was the average time on page.

Of course that you can also check this information for New Visitors as well. This custom report shows you relevant metrics for each page New and Returning Visitors.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas for custom reports and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track how your website performs then Custom Reports is something that you should pay really close attention to. You can basically choose to see only what matters to you and most important you can also customize a single Custom Report to serve different purposes.

You can show different metrics about the same dimension depending on what each department needs. The Custom Report that I want to talk about today will show you what pages were viewed on your website because of a keyword.

So, when someone types a keyword in a search engine and that person clicks on your link, because of that search, what pages he/she saw on your website, what was the bounce rate, how many visits, how many new visits, what was the avg. time on page and so on.

The answer to all these small questions is a Custom Report. So, in case you know nothing about Custom Reports, I have an article about how to create custom reports in Google Analytics. In case you do know how to create one, log in into your Google Analytics account and hit create new custom report.

Here are the suggested metrics to place in your custom report (you can place what metrics you want): Bounce Rate, Page Views, Avg. Time on Page, Visits, New Visits, %New Visits. As dimension you’ll chose, of course, Keyword and as additional drill down dimension chose Page Title. Create the report and view it.

The first thing you’ll see is a table with a list of keywords and all the metrics you selected above. Click on one of those keywords (I like to start with those that have more Page Views) and now you’ll have a table showing you what pages from your website were viewed by a user that arrived on your website through that specific keyword.

While you are viewing this second table you have the option to display a secondary dimension. Chose Landing Page from the drop down menu and you’ll see on what page the reader entered your website.

Let me know what you think about custom reports and how you use it. Share your experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

I recently had to perform an SEO analysis on a website that had a high bounce rate and the main question of the owner was “why such a high bounce rate, if I have good quality content?”. I looked at the text content from the website and he was right: lots of good information but extremely high bounce rate.

How to look at it in Google Analytics Reports

When you’re checking the bounce rate you should also look at it together with time on site. Only when you’ll have a high bounce rate and almost zero seconds time on site you should think that your content is not relevant to what the reader was searching for. And only then you should try and find out the sources of traffic for that page and better understand the bounce rate.

But if you have high bounce rate and a couple of minutes time on site then this means the content was relevant to what the readers were looking but they didn’t had a good reason to navigate further. This is a common issue to blogs because many articles are created as standalone pages. This was the case of the website I analyzed: lots of good content with no natural links placed in text to point to other topic related articles.

Suggestions to improve bounce rate

When you plan your articles don’t just think of standalone articles: try and plan groups of articles. Start with the main one that speaks about a problem in general terms and from there go for more specific articles. Link between articles in a natural way and use descriptive anchor text. Don’t just place links on words like “here”.

If someone sees the link for the first time, without reading your article he should already have a general idea about what the next page would be.

Your turn

What do you think of this? Did you find this information on bounce rate useful? Share your experience and please consider subscribing to my blog.

You must have some kind of analytic software installed on your website: you have no other option. Not knowing the stats for your website is like walking in the dark and hoping for the best to happen. I personally use Google Analytics because it’s free, easy to use and offers great info.

Basically an analytic software will tell you how users come to discover your content and what they’re doing while on your website.

A very important aspect of the problem is this:

1. Where are my readers located?
2. How they find me?

Why is very important to correlate these two reports: it may give you the answer to the question “why am I not selling anything?”. If you want to rank well for a certain keyword that you believe it will bring you conversions and you see that you receive traffic from that keyword but no conversion, what do you do?

The first thing is to look at the landing page to see if your readers arrive where you want. But if this is ok then you’ll have to see from what country your readers are. If your company only sells products in UK and you get traffic from other countries then that traffic it’s irrelevant to you.

This is something that you’ll have to think about not only in the case of keywords: direct traffic, referral or e-mail correlated with location can help you solve many issues. If you are trying to market on a social network and you’re not getting traffic from the location you’re interested in then maybe you should change your message or the social network.

Location can also be responsible for high bounce rates or low bounce rates with no conversion. The implications of a location can be huge: different culture, difference expressions, a different way to look at your products/services, different prices and the list could continue.

What do you think of this? Share your experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

The way search engines provide search results has change dramatically in the last years. Custom search is something that you need to be aware, together with custom social search results. In case you didn’t knew until now, here are some factors that influence the search results:

-          Location, time of day, browser settings, profile settings and preferences

Also, there is a new feature from Google where you can link your social accounts and when you perform a search Google will also display results from your social network related to your search term. That is why a top ranking on your computer might not even make it to page 10 for someone across the globe.

You can create a special filter, if you’re using Google Analytics to see the rankings for each keyword. Then you can check the country and city, landing page and bounce rate to have a full image of what that keyword is really bringing you. I have a full article about how to create a filter to check your rankings in Google Analytics.

Did you ever wonder what is going on in your website? What the users click, or what other pages do they visit after seeing a particular article? Here is how you can access that information. First you’ll need an analytic software installed on your website. This article is about how you can view this kind of information in Google Analytics.

Log in into your Google Analytics account and identify in a report the link to a page you’re interested in. Here are some ways to go find a specific page in a report. Go to Content, Top Landing Pages or Content by Title and search for your page. Once you find it click on the link displayed in the table.

A new page will open with few very important links in the right:

1. Navigation Summary. By clicking this link you’ll see what other pages users visited before the specified page and what other pages visited after. Also you’ll see the percentage of users that exit the website.
2. Entrance Sources. The information displayed will let you know how people arrived to that page. From the table that opens choose as secondary information to view Medium. This way you’ll be able to see if the source is a referral, organic search, direct or e-mail.
3. Entrance Keywords. Knowing what keywords sent traffic to that page can be extremely useful. Especially because many times a page might receive traffic from keywords related to the subject but that we didn’t planned to optimize for.
4. Site Overlay. This feature will open your website in a new window with an overlay on top of it from Google. The additional information displayed will tell us, for every page, where users clicked.

Let me know if you find this article useful and what is your opinion or questions on this. Also consider subscribing to the blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

Google Analytics shows you reports about 3 kinds of traffic: direct, referral and search engine. It’s important to understand how to look at these reports and how to spot problems.

Direct traffic comes from people that type your website address directly in the browser or click on a bookmark.

Referral traffic is traffic send from other websites. This means that you have a link on another website, or you post a link or an article on another website.

Search engine traffic is traffic that your website receives from search engines. Here you can see the non-paid traffic or paid traffic. If you pay for a service like AdWords knowing what paid keywords sent you traffic and what was the bounce rate could be useful.

For paid keywords you can evaluate the landing page relevancy for that keyword by analyzing the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high you should ask yourself if it’s worth paying for those keywords or you should work some more on the landing page to increase the relevancy towards that keyword.

You can also look at All Traffic Sources to see what kind of source send you most of the traffic. In the table you’ll see the source of the traffic followed by its type: /referral, /direct, /email or /organic (traffic from organic rankings on search engines). Looking at all the traffic is a good method to rapidly spot the big areas that need improvement.

While looking to the All Traffic Sources, you’ll see in the right-up corner of the table few visualization options, Views. Choose the forth icon from the left that says Comparison. For all traffic sources you’ll see now its performance compared to the sites average.

This way you can see what traffic source helps your site average performance or its pulling you down. You have different options like Visits, Pages/Visits, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.

NOTE: If your website is a blog then a high Bounce Rate can be normal. You can improve it by writing more articles on the subject and link between content in a natural and logical way.

When you look at the Keyword report an interesting option to View the table is Pivot (right-up corner of the table). For each keyword you’ll see how many visits you received and from what search engine. With this viewing option active you can select to see Visits and Bounce rate and you can see the bounce rate from each search engine, for every keyword. For example I have a keyword that send me traffic with 100% bounce rate from Google and 0% bounce rate from Bing.

Let me know what you think about this article. Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow and if you find it useful please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my content directly in your e-mail.

This is another short article about Google Analytics. It’s possible that you also read the previous articles too, about setting goals and custom reports. The tip from today, about Google Analytics, is a useful one, especially if you don’t have time to look at your analytics every day.

You know how you use Google Alerts to receive e-mails when someone mentions the keywords you specify? The same thing you can do in Google Analytics with Intelligence. This feature enables you to set alerts that will notify you in case something good, or bad, happens.

How to set it up

You can find this feature by logging into your Google Analytics account and click on your website’s profile. In the left side, under My Customizations, you’ll see Intelligence. Click the link and you are ready to create your own alerts or to select one from 7 templates that will notify you in case, for example, the total visits decreases by more than 50.0% or the average time on site decreases by more than 50.0% and so on.

If you want to set up your own alert you can select to receive it on a daily basis or once a week or month. Here is how you should think when you want to create your own alert. For what type of traffic I want to be alerted if a certain metric does condition-X?

Why to set up alerts in Google Analytics?

If you don’t have time or you don’t want to look at your analytics every day but still, you want to know when something bad happens or something really good then this feature called Intelligence is the thing to use.

What do you think?

Let me know if this article was useful to you by writing your comments here bellow. And if you find it useful please consider subscribing to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Custom reports are a very useful feature from Google Analytics. I use it all the time but I don’t actually create the report. I don’t want to overcrowd my data. I just go and set different reports for preview only and this offers me enough information.

When to use Custom Reports

I’m using Custom Reports when I want to better understand some data. Of course that Google Analytics offers you all the information you need but sometimes is not easy to see the thing that interests you with all the additional information around it.

That is why I turn to Custom Reports: I like to be able to look only at what I need: things like the bounce rate for the type of visitors or for the source referrals. Basically you can set your custom report do display any metric or combination of metrics for all sort of events.

How to create a Custom Report

Log into your Google Analytics account and click the View Report link for your website. In the left side you’ll see a link Custom Reporting. Click the link, then Manage Custom Reports and Create new custom report. Then it’s easy: drag and drop the metrics you want to see and for what dimension.

Then you can click on the Preview report link and check your custom report. You have the ability to save it or just cancel. I like to create reports and just preview the results. For me this feature is a great way to better see and understand the data about my website.

How do you use Custom Reports?

How do you use custom reports in Google Analytics? Why? Share your ideas and opinions.

If you ever wondered about goals in Google Analytics, about how to set one up and why would you do it, here is some info on that. I’ll assume you have Google Analytics installed on your website and this is not the first time you hear about it.

It’s going to be basic operations that any person with a minimum knowledge of web browsing can perform.

How to set up a Goal in Google Analytics

Before you access the data for your website you’ll see an edit link in the right side of the name of your website. Click it and on the page that opens you’ll see the add goals link. You can create a maximum of 20 goals divided in 4 sets.

You’ll have the possibility to choose what type of goal you would like to set up. If you didn’t thought about your goals here is the moment to do it. I think that the types of goals that you can set up are very helpful in understanding how to think of your website’s goal.

You can set up a goal for a certain URL, a certain number of visits to your website or a certain pages/visit. And if you think about it this is all that you need. Maybe your goal is to make people read a certain page, or to receive a certain number of visitors. Maybe you’re goal is to keep people on your website for at least 5 minutes.

A great thing is that you can also attach a certain dollar value to your goal. Why this is useful: let’s say that every person that comes to your website and reaches a certain page is worth 5$ to spend for. And from all the persons that reach that page only 10% decide to contact you. Now you do the math and see if it’s worth to spend that kind of money to advertise that page. It’s an interesting way to evaluate your efforts.

How goals help improve the functionality of your website

A really great feature is the possibility to set funnels for URL goals. This means that you can track if the reader will perform certain steps to reach a certain page. For example you may design your website with the following goal: after the main page the user should go to page-X that will prepare the sell and then to page-Y where you make the sell.

It’s possible that accessing a certain page before the page that actually presents the service is extremely important to you. Here is a reason for thinking this way: maybe you explain your services in a page and in another you talk about prices. Or you want to see if people that accessed your testimonial page, automatically went to the conversion page.

Tracking this can be very useful to see how well you can control your visitors. Another example: a page contains an add with some special offers and you want to see how many people decided to access the service page after reading about your special offers. Basically the possibilities are endless.

What uses do you see for goals?

It’s your turn to share your experience or your questions. Share your opinions and ideas in comments bellow.