Many of Verndale’s SEM tips focus on implementing, increasing, or optimizing online initiatives. In this week’s SEM Tip of the Week, we look at the other side of the coin, or the actual analytics that we use to determine effectiveness and efficiency. There are many ways to slice and dice the data, but what we really want to know is which metrics are important and how they correlate with one another and user behavior. This post will focus on SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) and how you can read your own data to gain insights about user behavior on your website.
Visits: Different analytics platforms define visitors in a variety of ways, such as unique visitors, absolute unique visitors, and so one. Verndale prefers to mainly pay attention to visits since the visitor data can be skewed by a variety of things like browser add-ons, automatic cookie deletion and so forth. Use this key performance indicator to understand the overall traffic standings of your website and try not to infer too much about how many actual people are coming to your website.
Time on Site: This metric is useful for understanding engagement. If you have a set of pages with a low "time on site," that means that your content isn’t engaging, or just isn't satisfying the users’ intent. However, be wary of trusting this metric completely, because time on site can be skewed since it's an average of all of the time on site for all users. To understand behavior, you need to segment time on site to see where the heaviest distribution truly lies.
Bounce Rate: One of the most insightful KPIs, bounce rate is defined differently by different vendors, but generally corresponds to a user landing on a page and leaving within less than 5-10 seconds. A high bounce rate means the user thought, “this page is not what I wanted or intended to find.” Monitor your bounce rates closely to see where users keep finding non-relevant content and adjust your navigational path(s) accordingly.
Exit: A useful metric for understanding how many users engaged the content of your website and how many people left your website after visiting this page. This metric is different from the bounce rate since these users have stuck around for a little while, but now want to leave. If your exit rate is high, then that means the page might be correlated with a completed action, or your website doesn’t serve the user the right next step to keep them entertained.
Use these analytics tips to understand how users are behaving on your website and recommend strategies based on the data, not on opinion. For information about SEO training, analytics, and more, please contact your SEO team.