What’s Happening? Google knows

Everyone knows that Google Knows All, what many don’t know is that they will also tell you what’s happening.  The key to that is using Google Analytics, with a small bit of code added to your website Google will give you all kinds of information and data.

Information and Data are King in the internet.  If you don’t know what’s happening to your customers when they visit your site you have no clue what they like and what they don’t.  Watching metrics like bounce rate, conversions and other data that Google will give you is the only way to manage your website.

Here is a snapshot of what is happening on one of the properties I happen to operate. What’s it telling me? Well it’s telling me a number of things.  First it’s telling me what my sites performance is improving, a good thing, it’s also telling me that my bounce rate is dropping, a good thing. Finally it’s telling me my site is stickier.

So what’s all this garbage mean? Users going up means I have more visitors to my site, that’s a good thing without visitors you don’t make sales.

Bounce Rate is the rate at which people decide this isn’t what I’m looking for go back to the search results.  As you can see my rate has declined over 40% a significant decline meaning more people are finding what they want.

Time on site tells me that people are spending more time on my site, that is a good thing as well.  People are not only finding things they like on the site they are also spending more time looking around.  This can be a good and a bad thing.  It could mean they are searching for something longer before giving up or making a purchase.  This is kind of a good thing as they are seeing more of what you are offering but, it could also mean they are not finding what they want.

This is where testing begins, once you have a baseline on what your site is doing you can begin to make changes and soon your visitors and customers will tell you if it was a good change or a bad one.