Webmasters often use the number of “hits” a website or a page receives to determine the success ratio of their websites! Recently, the Official Google Blog has come up with a few useful tips to determine the same.

“You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a “hit” meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed)”- Google

It seems that the concept of “hits” metrics is pointless. Therefore, Google is coming up with a diverse range of in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the actual performance of web pages. One of the metrics is Bounce rate.

“While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!)”- Google

Bounce rate has these attributes:

1. 1.It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2. 2.It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3. 3.It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

However, Google also admits that their tool Google Analytics enables the website owners to understand their visitors in a better way. If you have a Google Analytics account, you’ll see this when you log in:

This image shows that almost 76.93% people visit a site and left, and it hurts! Following are two tips by Google to solve this problem:

1. 1.“Find out where your visitors are coming from and which of these sites sends visitors with the highest bounce rate. To do so, all you have to do is go to “Traffic Sources” (in Google Analytics, or whatever tool you are using), click on “Referring Sites,” and boom!

   In about fifteen seconds you know which sites are your “best friends forever” (BFFs), and where you need to look a tad deeper. By identifying the sites that are sending you visitors with high bounce rates, you can investigate the reasons why (the campaigns, the context in which your link is placed, the ads) and make changes to ensure that visitors find what they are looking for when they come to your site.

   However, it may not just be the campaigns that turned your readers away; it could be the specific page that your visitors landed on. That leads to my tip 2.

2. 2.Go to “Content” (labeled as such in Google Analytics) and click on “Top Landing Pages” report:”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 5:54 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.