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.

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.

First thing that I consider important is this: any analytic software is meant to suggest some actions. Don’t just read your website reports: you have the answer to some of your problems right in front of you. Take action and then go back and measure it.

Top Landing Pages is a feature that shows you what pages, from your website, are used as entry gates. The tip that I have for you is to use these top landing pages to direct users deeper in your website.

There are two major cases of top landing pages:

1. The main page of your website
2. Particular pages/articles from your website

In the first case you have a lot more choices to direct people to other pages but when it comes to a particular page you have to be careful and direct readers to relevant content. When you want to improve the functionality of a particular page don’t place links to general pages (I mean don’t try to divert readers to your main page, for example).

The reason is that those people arrived on that page because they’re interested in that subject. A logical thing to do would be to direct them to more related subjects and from those subjects to other pages and so on.

So, your top landing pages could be the engine of your website if you know how to proper link it to the rest of your website.

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

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.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

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.

-          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.

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.

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.

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.