After doing everything you can think of to improve the performance of your website, you may still find yourself wondering why it is not achieving its set goals. You`ve made the design user-friendly, you`ve added valuable content, and you`ve invested money and time into marketing it. Yet your Analytics report displays a rather dangerous looking bounce rate, which doesn`t show an inclination to decrease anytime soon.

The definition for Bounce Rate given by Kichus.in is the percentage of web site visitors who exited from the entry pages without going any deeper into the site. The bounce rate is a great measurement of the quality of traffic that is entering the site, and the overall effectiveness of the design, layout and onsite content. It also acts as a tool in PPC for detecting ‘click fraud`, since an unusually high bounce rate (more that 60% or so) is significant enough to raise some alarm.

Google Analytics development began after Google acquired Urchin three years ago. The popularity of which has since soared beyond that of a mere supplementary side-service.

WebProNews reports a study by Pingdom that indicates that 32 percent out of the Alexa global top five hundred performing websites on the internet use Google Analytics to monitor their web stats.

Somewhere along the line, Google worked out that if they offer their powerful analytics reporting software for free, website owners everywhere would grab at the opportunity, subsequently offering up their valuable web statistics to Google to do with whatever they please. An immediate resulting benefit for Google is that many commercial website owners are signing up for AdWords.

I recently upgraded my mobile, finally, after the long 2 year wait we have with mobile contracts in SA. While it has a bigger screen, higher screen resolution, and is 3G compatible, it`s not as feature packed as the models higher in Nokia`s N Series range, but hey, my N73 rocks . Instead of the standard GPRS for internet access on my mobile, 3G presents a faster connection speed, and to my amazement (yes I did know about it, but we need to test/play with things before we realise what they can do), webpages load faster than before. No more waiting to get to the office or home for internet access. I can now browse the internet fairly quickly on my mobile to find what I need at the exact moment I need to, wherever I am. Now, I realise that I`ve been slow to reach this stage in mobile technology, because other mobile users have been enjoying this benefit for quite some time, and it`s made me wonder if we in the SEM industry have taken note of this.

Just a quick post to say that we have noticed no Google Analytics data across the board for all clients for April 2, 2008.

We are looking into it and will post any updates as they become available.

Lets hope they havent lost data

Search Engine Strategies 2008, New York, is a global conference completely dedicated to the industry of search engine marketing (SEM), both pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO). But there are seminars that touch on other aspects of the SEM industry, such as social media marketing and local search.

There were two sessions that focused on web analytics: “Data Into Action” and “Measuring Success”, with the onus being on the importance of capturing data about your website`s traffic and then taking action on it.

Matt Bailey, from SiteLogic.com, stressed the importance of correctly reporting and recording the number of site visitors. He also mentioned that this data, if used properly, can lead to the realisation of predetermined goals. According to Bailey, having clearly set targets is vital, be it increased sales, leads, downloads, or page views.

Google has a new Benchmarking feature! At last you can compare your data to that of the rest of your industry, or any other industry for that matter.

You can evaluate data such as number of visits to your site, number of page views, number of pages per visit, bounce rate, average time spent on your site, and new visits.

To obtain this information though, you have to be willing to share your data anonymously. See the message below that would have appeared in your AdWords and/or Analytics accounts.

You can choose to share your data between Google Analytics and other Google services, or just with the other Google services. If you decide not to share your data at all, you will not have access to the benchmarking feature or any of the additional services and features Google is offering for this information.

SEO, landing pages, goal performance, conversion analysis. Where does a business start to progress from one side to the other? Going from a vague web representation of a business model to an efficient online machine, effectively attracting visitors through wide visibility and presence, determining their intent, and boldly directing them to their ultimate satisfaction, is a reasonable evolution for a business to aspire to.

Using web analytics is not a fun extramural activity to browse over and gloat about after the sales have been brokered or the service has been delivered. It is a dedicated reporting and analysis methodology focusing on KPI for improving the efficacy of a business model that is expressed online in some way.