Apr 232011
Struggling to increase web traffic? Slice and dice your website data to produce actionable insights and implement them to increase traffic. Here is how:
- Segment Data by various Traffic Sources: What percentage of traffic is coming from Display, Direct, Referral, and Search Engines? Search traffic might have higher intent than direct and referral traffic with lower Bounce Rate, higher avg time on site and higher pages per visit. Lifetime Value of a customer acquired through various sources (channels) can also be different. Refer to sample table below:
Traffic Sources % Visits Visits Bounce Rate (Quality Traffic) Avg Time on Site PPV % New Visits ROI Direct Traffic 38% 427,221 51% 0:01:44 2.2 93% $4 Search Engines 31% 367,394 34% 0:02:14 2.7 85% $5 Referring Sites 30% 254,760 47% 0:01:27 2.2 88% $3 Other 1% 8,066 $2 Overall Site 1,057,441 45% 0:01:48 2.4 89% - Segment Search Engine Data: Refer to sample table below. You might be surprised to see some search engines sending quality traffic compared to the other.
Where is traffic coming in Overall Search? Which traffic is more qualified? Source % Visits Bounce Rate Avg Time on Site PPV (Pages/Visit) Google 89% 34% 0:02:10 2.7 Yahoo 7% 20% 0:03:20 3.5 MSN 2% 20% 0:03:20 3.6 Other 2% 63% 0:04:20 3.4 Similar graph for Paid and Organic Search will also be useful.
- Distribution of Time on Site (TOS) and Page View Metric:Average TOS hides the real insights from you. Segment data by Distribution of TOS as below:
Time on site vs Percentage of Visitors
Similar distribution for Page Views Metric will be useful instead of average.
- Segment data by Most Viewed Pages, Top Entry Pages and Top Exit Pages: Great indicator of what people are looking for on your website. Sometimes top entry pages and top exit pages are the same, which is often ok because sometimes customer review the website and buy the same product in retail store.
- Segment data by Top Referring URL and Top Key Search Phrases
- New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors
- Segment Internal Site Search data vs. Exit Rate: Carefully look at key phrases with high exit rate. It might be indication of what to fix in Internal Search result for customer retention.
- Segment by Geography, time of the day, day of the week, demographics, Creative/AD, Site, Frequency etc.
Great article Shilpa.
We implemented strategy 1 and 8 on this blog.
Strategy 1 —>>
A)From the data we know that commenting on Avinash’s blog brought the readership that we want for this article(Analytics article) and bounce rate is much lower than social networking medium Facebook where targetted audience is less.
B) Bounce rate is lower for social article Lost 10 pounds in 2 months when referred from Facebook, reditt, digg and other health blogs.
I will try the similar comment strategy for 15 WordPress Blog customization – From beginner to professional by reaching out to bloggers and technical people (being in technical profession, I can generate a good readership by reaching to my colleagues).
Strategy 8 —>>I posted my article Lost 10 pounds in 2 months in the morning EST and shared on Facebook and other social medium around 6 PM. From web traffic data, we knew that our site had the most hit from after 6 PM and upto 9 PM. Yesterday, we had the most hits in last 7 days.
[…] The more you segment the data, the more insights you can produce. Refer to my previous article on how to slice and dice web data.Trending is the key: Trending data in various ways helps to produce insights. Trend current […]