Google Analytics, Controlling Bounce Rates - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 12

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle Unknown Secrets to SEO Podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us for another fun-filled edition of our podcast. My name's Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager at eWebStyle. And welcome to our Special Olympics Podcast. Why are we having a Special Olympics Podcast today? Well, apparently our President Obama made a gaffe on Jay Leno's show. You probably read about that. But he made some comment, apparently Obama's not such a good bowler. So Jay Leno was like, yeah, they probably just burned the bowling alley. And I believe Obama's comment was something to the effect of, yeah, I'm practicing and doing whatever I can. I bowled a 129. It was like the Special Olympics or something. Oh, Obama. Man, that's the kind of stuff you just say around your friends. You don't say that on a talk show. Yeah, Jay may be his friend. You say that at home when there's no cameras around. That's just, ugh. I actually think if you're President Obama and you're planning on making two terms, that's just something you don't say for eight years. Yeah, you just take that out of your vocabulary altogether. It does not. You know, Josh Blue can get away with that. He can. He definitely can. But President Obama and Josh Blue could actually make it funny. Hilarious, even. If you guys don't know who Josh Blue is, he won last comic standing in one of those episodes. I don't even know if they're still airing that anymore. You can find it on YouTube because that's where I did. And he has MS? Yes. Okay. Yeah, I actually saw him live here in Houston. That's right. On a show. It was pretty funny. He took questions afterwards. And one of the questions was, who would win, you or a guy with, he's got, no, he's got cerebral palsy. Okay. So he goes, who would win in a fight between you and a guy with MS? And Josh Blue said, well, I just waited out. Oh, yeah. Again,

Josh Blue can make it funny. Probably no one else. All right. So like we talked about last time, well, we covered a whole lot of stuff on Google Analytics last time. We don't even really need to go back into it. And so we're not going to. We're just going to move forward. And I really wanted to break down what is it that I look at when I'm looking at Google Analytics. And we can go into some good details about some of the power of Google Analytics. So off we go. The first thing, you just sign in. You go to Google Analytics. You obviously have to have an account. In our case, we've got a whole lot of accounts. Typically, when we get a new customer, we'll add a Google, we'll actually create a Google account in that, using that customer's email address. So we give that information, the username and password, to our customer. And then we sign in as our customer and add our company-wide Google account to that customer's account. So then we have access to see and tweak and make all the changes that we need to. Google has so many really valuable tools that that can be the springboard for using, I don't know, one of the powerful tools that I really like that Google has is the ability to make multiple copies of the same page but have them be slightly different. So maybe change the submit button or the buy now button, change it from buy now to subscribe now or whatever. Or it may be something not so purchase-focused. And, like, you can try different calls to action. Yeah. Maybe try different things and see how this particular button or image might work or convert as opposed to another one. Yeah. And so then you put a little bit of code on that page and every time that page is clicked on by a user, Google determines randomly which one is shown to the user. And then you can get, you know, which ones did the calls to

action work better on. Okay. That's a great tool. So when we give ourselves access, we give ourselves access to do all of that stuff. Then, of course, we have to put some code on every page that we want Google tracking on the customer's site. So this is a little more challenging, if you will, for websites that are all HTML code because you literally have to go to every page. Now, you can usually do a bulk replace, you know, find some, you know, the body tag at the bottom of it and replace it with the Google code and the body tag. And you do that for the whole directory and all of a sudden you're done. You've got Google in there. A lot of the websites that we put together have a borders, top border, bottom border, right border, left border. And so we'll typically just put our Google information, our Google analytics information in our bottom border. That's how that works. So when we go and we sign into Google analytics, you sign into your account, you sign into your account. And in our case, we see, you know, our customer base. So we can see that, you know, most of our, there's a customer that's no longer with us. So his percent change is a little lower. My wife has a website. We don't do much for it. It's gone. It's a percentage of change for a number of visits is a little bit lower. And you see, we actually have a number of accounts and these are all kind of accounts that we're partnered on under one specific heading here. And so we see this is kind of a global view of everybody we have access to. Then I can click into the account that has all of our others and we can go in on that one and see on a URL basis. And in this case, we're looking at our website, which is up 31%. We're looking at a couple others. And then we're looking at the one that I actually

visit a lot because we're partnered with this individual. It's patrickwanis.com. And you can see that he's, at least for this month, is up 4.9%. He's a fun website to play with because he gets a lot of traffic and he gets it from all different areas. So we have lots of opportunity to play with things like we just talked about multiple pages. We have opportunities to play with, hey, do we want an audio intro or a video intro? Which one does better, an audio intro, a video intro, or neither? And we get to do a lot of playing with search engine optimization. And then, you know, what ultimately creates the ROI for a particular website with his website. So the next thing is the dashboard. And, Paul, if I say anything or, you know, don't fall asleep on me here. I'll try not. The next thing is the dashboard. And this is, you know, as it sounds, it's the first screen that you see. And it has a pretty good overview of what you're looking at. On the dashboard, we can see all sorts of things. We can see for the last 30 days in the kind of upper right-hand corner, one of the things that I like to do, and I'll do it a little bit later in this podcast, is I'll actually just look at the last three days because we're making, constantly making changes to the website. And I'm really mostly interested in keywords, although I'm going to cover a lot of other stuff right now. What I'd like to see is, over the last three days, what keywords got people to our website. Of course, what are the bounce rates? What are things like that? What I'm looking for is, like, a new set of keywords that, you know, are bringing an amount of traffic. And what that'll typically mean is that we've gotten much better placement for a particular set of keywords, and we want to follow that and follow those keywords. Go type those keywords in Google and see what

page they land on, and then make sure that that's a good landing page for those particular keywords, you know, geared towards that. Other things that's nice to look at, we can see number of visits. We can see here, Patrick has 86.5% of his visits are new visits, so that's great. That's all new people. That's all search engines. If you scroll down a little bit, you can actually see that 71% of his traffic comes from search engines. So, if the only thing that you're doing is getting other people to link to you or sending out emails, then most of your traffic is not going to come from search engines. In this case, you can clearly see that we're doing our job. We're making sure that anybody who's looking for subjects related to Patrick are showing up on Patrick's website because of search terms that they've put in. By the way, Patrick, what he does and what he sells is a human behavior expert. He's on TV on a regular basis. He gives talks at different conferences on relationships, on success, and he's got a whole slew of products from quit smoking to find your perfect mate match. So, it's a lot of self-help stuff. There's a lot of products. And again, it's really fun to play with this particular website because it does get a good amount of traffic. One of the things we can do on this, which is pretty interesting, is actually we can click into the content, which is on the left, and this gives an overview of content, how many page views are, unique views, and bounce rates, which were also available on the dashboard, but we can actually see what the top content is. So, here we can see that his index page gets 11% of his views. That's a significant amount of the views. The next predominant one is What a Woman Wants book, which is a book that Patrick wrote called What a Woman Wants and How to Give it to Her. So, when we go and look at

the keywords, we'll probably see some keywords that are very relevant to What a Woman Wants that are sending traffic. He also has a number of blog entries, so we can see that. And actually, I can now click the full report, and again, I'm looking at the top 10 pages, and this is over the last 30 days. So, this is a really, really good way to look at the content on your website. We can actually show more rows. There's actually 465 different rows for Patrick. We can go down to, let's say, just kind of look at the top 50 and see if anything really stands out. He does live phone consultations, so we see that. We see Stop Smoking Hypnosis, which is some of the keywords that we're working on right now. And something really interesting here is we can actually look at bounce rates. In fact, the headers for the rows here have bounce rate. It actually has page views, which is the default sort, unique page views, average time on a page, bounce rate. So, we can click, I haven't done this in a while, so I might come up with some interesting information that you guys can see here. So, we click average time on page. Now, some of these are clearly going to be skewed, because somebody spent almost two hours on a why men want women to cook for them blog entry. We can probably imagine that he read the first 10 minutes and went off and asked his woman to cook for him. And then there was an hour and 54-minute discussion after that. And then he came back and said how to please a woman in bed, which is another of Patrick's products. So, the next one, you know, why people reject love, that's probably a little more reasonable, which is 25 minutes, and then it goes on and on. So, that's a good way to kind of look at those pages that are really good. Now, we can switch that up, we click that again, and it sorts

by time on page. And, of course, we have a whole lot of zeros. So, we know that people, and this is one of the things that we're working on, there is a page Patrick has, which is Baltimore Quit Smoking Hypnosis. And it's targeting the keywords, quit smoking Baltimore, quit smoking hypnosis Baltimore. And you can imagine anybody who goes in and types quit smoking Baltimore is probably looking for a hypnotherapist, well, if they include hypnosis, in the Baltimore area. So, we're doing well in search engine placement on that. We've just got another hurdle, which is, although they came to our webpage, they are what we would call not very targeted. Because they're looking for a hypnotherapist in Baltimore, Patrick is not in Baltimore, so we can definitely say it's not targeted. So, now, that page has to be geared, written, it's got audio on it, specifically to try and address, hey, we know that you were looking for a therapist. Here's why a CD, my CD, is actually better than a therapist. As good, better, best, whatever. Or a great accompaniment to actually getting a therapist. So, it's not actually that surprising that the average time on the website is zero. Because, you know, they come here, they're looking for a therapist in Baltimore, they quickly realize that, and they go. That also has a very interesting parallel to the bounce rate, the infamous bounce rate. So, we can also click on the bounce rate. We can look at, you know, which ones had zero bounce rate, and the average amount of time that they spent on the website. By the way, let me go back to this. So, even the one that had a person who stayed for two hours, the bounce rate on that page is about 95%. So, in this case, a lot of Patrick's blog entries are very unique. You know, like, there's why men want a woman to cook for them. The next one is why people reject love. You know, those are probably topics that people are coming into his

website, reading, and then leaving. So, we're not actually that concerned about a bounce rate. Although, as we improve other aspects of the website, we'll probably come back and revisit these and see, you know, what kind of borders can we put on this blog that might be more interesting to people. You know, get them to sign up for the newsletter or whatever. And then we can sort bounce rate. 100% is Baltimore quit smoking. Denver quit smoking and happiness book. Although, three people averaged five, almost six minutes on that website, that's not too bad. So, in that case, I can guarantee you, the happiness book page does not, probably has one call to action which we haven't optimized, and that's the, you know, buy the happiness book, which is an e-book. So, you know, you've got to be fair with yourself. You'd like 100% of the people who came to that page to buy stuff, to buy that book. That book is also an e-book. And there are people out there who just won't read e-books. You know, they want a hard copy book, which it's not available hard copy. So, those are the kinds of things that we look at here. We also have goals. I've defined goals. They don't show up on the content page. They're going to show up based on everything. Now, here's some more interesting stuff. So, I'm going to click on, let's go back and sort by page views. And so, again, the index page is the number one. Let's click on the number two, which is What a Woman Wants Book. This pulls up details about What a Woman Wants Book, and it has some really good information. One piece of information, we can actually see that it created one sale because it did complete a goal. And we can also click the entrance sources. So, what this is going to give us is what was the page from which they came in order to get to the website and ultimately to this page. So, this doesn't necessarily mean that

they came from Yahoo directly to What a Woman Wants. It just means they came from Yahoo, got in, figured their way, somehow got to What a Woman Wants. And they completed a goal. And some of them completed a goal. So, in this case, it's kind of saying, okay, if the goal was What a Woman Wants to get them to that page, how are we achieving that goal? Because we've got, and the first one on the list is actually Yahoo. What that tells me is that we're doing better on Yahoo for What a Woman Wants keywords than we are on Google. And I can show you that here in a little bit because we'll look at the percentage of traffic we get from Google versus Yahoo. And it's significant. We're getting a significant more number of views from Yahoo than from Google, almost four times. I have a question. And I think this might be something you're going to talk about here in a minute. I might be getting ahead. Because this was confusing to me when I first saw it. Okay. The difference between bounce rates and percentage exit. Okay. So, a bounce rate is typically when you come to this page and you leave the site. The percentage exit means this is the page that you last were on. And after you visited this page, you then exited the website. Okay. And that makes perfect sense. So, bounce rate is in and out and an exit rate is, this was, I may have come to the website, I may have stayed like five, six different places, and then I left. And this was 89% of the exits from the website left on this page. Okay. So, hopefully that makes sense. Perfect sense. And since the two columns are side by side, I mean, the very first time I saw this, it was confusing. I was like, okay, what exactly is the difference between a bounce? I mean, obviously a bounce means they're going right back, but then percentage of exits. So, it can be

kind of confusing. But I do want, now, I mean, it's very clear. Well, and interestingly enough that you could actually have it be, you know, a bounce is also an exit. Okay. Right? But an exit isn't necessarily a bounce. A bounce. Okay. Yeah. And that makes perfect sense. Kind of like all bananas are fruits, but not all fruits are bananas. I was thinking, I'm trying to think of an analogy, but it just was drawing blank. Okay. So, that's pretty good. Some really good information. We can break that down. If we go back, we can also look like what the entrance keyword. So, what keywords were used to ultimately get a woman, get somebody to the what a woman wants? And, not surprising, we have on the top, we have, what are wants women in sex? I'll repeat that. Because it wasn't me misreading it. What are wants women in sex? And that's R-A-R-E, not O-U-R. Because I thought it was what our wants. So, what are wants women in sex? What? Yeah. Anyway. The next one is a little, maybe more logical, criterion that a woman wants in her boyfriend, and so on and so forth. So, this is just a good way to figure out, okay, what keywords ultimately drive people to this website? And I'm sure we'll find some in here. You know, are women emotional thinkers? Some of this stuff is probably, you know, they started on another page. The search took them to another page on the website, and they ultimately ended up on what a woman wants book. So, another interesting thing here is we've got entrance paths, we've got navigation summary. Those are things that you should explore on your own. Site overlay is very interesting because you can click it, it'll actually pull up a version of your page, and then Google will actually overlay what people clicked from this page. So, when we click Patrick's What a Woman Wants page, we can see that 0.3% of people went to the audio book, 1.4% went to visit the

gallery, what else do we got? There was a substantial number of bounces on this page, so 0.7% went to view the cart. So, those are, it's a really interesting overlay to see, okay, once somebody's here, where are they clicking on the website? Now, we may have discussed this before, if you've got multiple links going to the same page, and this is one of the pages that you're going to use on a regular basis, this site overlay, then what you want to do is you want to make each link a distinct link to the same page, and you do that with a little bit of code, so that then Google can actually tell you, are they clicking the gallery on the left, or are they clicking the gallery on the top? Because you might want to know that, and if they're clicking on the top, you might make one decision, if they're clicking on the left, you might make another decision. So, you can add, even though they may go to the same page, that's all Google is showing you, is what page are they going to, you just need to make it a slightly, with code, a slightly different page, so that you can actually track which link slash button on the page are they pressing. I feel like I'm doing a lot of lecturing. It makes perfect sense. Okay, good. Very good. So, we're going to go back now, and we're going to talk about the thing that I really check the most. So, if we go back to the dashboard, and we scroll down a little bit, there is a little area called Traffic Sources Overview, and I mentioned it a little earlier, it talks about, you can see right away, Patrick gets 71% of his traffic from search engines, and we mentioned that. So, I click View Report on Traffic Sources Overview, and we see a couple interesting things on this kind of summary of traffic sources. On the right, it gives us like the top five keywords that people come to

our website, come to Patrick's website, and we can see that a substantial number actually arrived because they used subconscious test. He does really well in that, and he's got a number of subconscious test products, so we're constantly tweaking that one because that's where a lot of traffic comes from. We're always working on better search engine placement for the other keywords, and we want to be working on the website, not on the search engine placement for those keywords that are already doing well. That makes sense, right? Yeah. So, a couple things we'll notice. On the left, we see top traffic sources. Again, if you're just sending out emails or you're getting people to your website, maybe because you're handing out flyers, or maybe because you're putting a link on some other webpage, then your top sources aren't going to be search engines. In our case, we're getting 71% from search engines, so the top four of the top five sources are actually search engines. As it should be because we're doing search engine optimization on it, so it should be that way. That's what we do. That is what we do. And not surprisingly, so we talk almost exclusively about Google when we're talking about search engine optimization. If you look on this site, it says 44% of the total hits that came to Patrick's site, not total hits, but total visits, came from Google. Now, that's not the 60% or 70% that I mentioned earlier, right? Well, we're going to go ahead and view the full report, and so now we can actually see 10. In fact, I'm going to branch down, and we'll look at the top 50. And what you'll notice is we've got a couple other search engines below the fifth, which would be Dogpile, Ask, probably another Google.com where they didn't get, that's interesting, which is a referral, you'll also start to see a lot of, some from our website, eWebStyle, actually pointing to Patrick, and then you see a lot of mail.yahoo.com. If you had to guess, Paul, what would

that be? If I took a wild guess, I'd probably say that was Patrick's newsletter, and they went from his newsletter to his website. Yep, so he sends out a newsletter on a weekly basis, which we recommend all of our customers to do. It's a great way to build customer loyalty and continue to get sales. He gets some sales almost every newsletter he sends out, so it's a great way to keep in touch with your clients. When those users, those emails that he's sending out, end up in somebody's Yahoo email, and then they click the link to his website, it shows up as message. We look at things like here, like message 201.mail.yahoo.com. So that's how they ended up on our website. So when we look at Google, the organic placement, and we see that Google accounts for 44%, let's just break down, and what I did is I actually went ahead and broke down the numbers of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live. Google, between those search engines, Google brought 64%. Okay. So in this case, I'm not even counting Dogpile and the others, but Google brings 64%, Yahoo brought 26%, MSN brought 6%. Now this is of his search engine traffic? Of his search engine traffic. Okay. In fact, all I'm doing is adding the visits from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live, and then dividing out how many actually came from each. Okay. So, and again, Live brought 0.3%. So if you were to focus on two search engines, Google and Yahoo, at least the case is true for us, you're getting 90% of the search engine traffic that our website gets. Yes. If you do just one, Google, you're getting 64%. 60%. So, you know, if you're going to spend any time on one, it has to be Google. Yeah. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And to me, that's what's so great about this software is that it lets you know, hey, this is how and where you need to spend your time. You know, these are the keywords that

people are using to find you. These are the search engines they're using to find you. So it kind of does the math for you and just kind of directs you in the right, or guides you in the right direction. You know, and it's about where should I be spending my time? You know, you kind of want to be spending your time on where you're not doing well. Well, you want to be spending time on getting better search engine placement, and where you're doing well, you want to be spending time on on-site optimization, customer experience, if you will. The other thing that I look on this page, and again, I will usually break down this page so that I'm just looking at the last three days, three or four days. And then what that does is just say, you know, are there any keywords that are really popping up to the top that are, you know, new and I haven't seen before, and what can I do to look at them? So I've narrowed it down to the last four days. That includes today. And where it says keywords, there's the five keywords that have brought the most traffic. I'm going to click view full report. And here we can do the same kind of breakdown as we did when we were looking at the content. We can sort by page visits. We can sort by average time on-site. So the most traffic he gets is from the keyword subconscious test. If we click page visits, we get the most traffic page visits from what women are abusers attracted to. So I don't know if that's an abuser trying to figure out how he finds more women. How to target a woman to abuse. Paul, that's not funny. Remember that thing you tell your friends and don't laugh about in public? It's a good thing all of our listeners are my close personal friends. Good close personal friends, exactly. This is immediately followed by how to control over a woman's mind. I'm sorry. And I've got

to throw out a decent one. The next one is hypnotherapy, quit smoking, St. Louis, Missouri. I'm sorry. Boy. So we can assume that the first two are the same person. Yeah. And so we can see that, you know, that person visited 47 and when they searched the first time pages and then 20 pages the second time, the average time on-site, well, it's only one person. So he spent 30 minutes the first time and 20 minutes the second time. But you can see some really interesting things like people who typed in Patrick Llanes, obviously looking for him. There were two of them who did this in this particular report and they visited eight and a half pages and they averaged 25 minutes on the website. So those are some really valuable things because, you know, maybe they go through 50 pages in two minutes. Well, you know they're not reading them. Okay. Or they go through one page in five minutes or they go through five pages and their average time on-site is, you know, 25 minutes. Well, that information kind of tells you a lot about your customer. I don't know what those first keywords are telling us about Patrick's customers, but they are telling us something. So we can break it down that way. The other thing, there's a tab kind of near the top under where the graph is that says goal conversions. So we can click goal conversions and then we can sort by conversion ratio. And we can see, at least in this report, there's at least one example of, wow, the how to control over a woman's mind turned into a purchase. So he liked what he read and he actually purchased something. So we can see what that was and report him to the authorities. I'm just kidding. But not really. So there is some great information here. We're actually out of time. So, and I think we really covered, this is what I will do on a typical day. I'll come in and I'll look at the keywords

and I'll see what are new keywords that are attracting traffic and make sure that those pages that customers are ending on, that those pages are, you know, designed appropriately with calls to action and things like that. Man, it was just getting good. Why do we have to stop? Yeah, we could find out more customers with Patrick. So thank you guys for listening. Again, if you have any questions, comments, if you know who that guy is, send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. And somebody here at our company will, you know, get back to you. We'll try and get it on our podcast for you. We really appreciate you listening. We really appreciate the opportunity to give back to the SEO community. Again, if you have any questions, just let us know. Until next podcast, I'm Chris Burris signing out. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.