Making the most of your site

Once you have got customers to visit your site, do not think the task is complete. There are a number of other items that need to be addressed.

• How long do they stay there
• How many pages do they view
• How many people look at one page and leave straight away (This is known as the Bounce Rate.)

Page views

This graph shows a years worth of information taken from one of our customers sites. This is a global site with around 500,000 page views a year and it shows the average number of pages that each visitor visits per day. It shows a number of peaks which reflects various events that have taken place throughout the year. However, you will also note that the average has increased for 5 to over 6 pages. This is only one of a number of statistics that are worth monitoring but is a good indication that the viewer is finding more of interest in your site. At PowerShock we try to help customers ensure that this number grows.

Bounce Rate

As outlined on the Average page views there are a number of items that indicate how interested potential customers are in your site, or to be more precise, its content. The Bounce Rate is where a viewer finds a page looks at it and immediately exits. This is an indication that he or she did not not find what they were looking for and more than likely, they had landed on the wrong site from the search engine results page. Either way this is a figure that should be kept as low as possible.

This graph shows 365 days of bounce rate information taken from a customer site that was taken over by PowerShock at the beginning of the period shown. As you can see, when we started the Bounce Rate was over 30%. This means that one in three of every visitors were leaving immediately. After careful work by PowerShock you can see that we reduced the average figure to under 20%, This is still ongoing, but we are happy with the trend.

Visitors from where?

Visitor Source

So you have a good number of visitors to your site. The next question is 'Where are they coming from'. You may have paid for have links in other sites, known as referring sites. It is nice to be able to check that your money has been well spent and are they sending good quality potential customers.

The pie chart shown to the left was taken from a customer where PowerShock took over the site maintenance. It shows that Google was the main referring site, followed closely by direct links (this tends to be where people have the site book marked in their Browser). However, on closer inspection there was a strange entry. "Woodlands-junior" was the third highest site that people were coming from to visit this site. Even higher than Yahoo. On investigation it turned out that this was a primary school in the UK whose pupils were using the fact the we had a nice image of Balmoral castle on our site which was being used in a school project. While we did not want to discourage the youngsters in their early academic studies, we needed to understand that they were probably not in the correct segment to potentially purchase the product being advertised. (We did keep the picture - but stopped counting the visits)