Here are some questions and answers regarding Google Analytics and how to understand the reports you might receive from time to time.
Direct Traffic accounts for xx.xx% of visits to my website. How can I improve that?
Increasing Direct traffic is not necessarily the most important thing to do. I would be more concerned about Referral and Organic traffic sources instead. Direct traffic is people who typed in your domain name directly into their browser’s address bar or who perhaps have your website bookmarked in their favorites. Another reason source of direct traffic might be from people opening up an email you sent them and clicking the website link in your signature. Not all mail programs work the same. Sometimes if a recipient is viewing your email in Outlook and they click a link to visit your website, it might look like a “direct” visit, however, if they were viewing your email in Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail, it might look like “Referral” traffic.
The top landing page is “/”, and xx.x% bounce out. Why is the top landing page”/”?
”/” represents the home page of your site. That’s the page that most people will enter your website, naturally. If your bounce rate is below 4%, there is probably something wrong with your web analytics tracking. However, if your bounce rate is above 70%, I would be concerned. Not everyone who lands on your website are there purposefully and sometimes people will leave because they don’t find the content relevant to their search.
Top keyword is “not provided.”
“(not provided)” is Google’s way of trying to protect their users. When someone is logged in to a Google product and performs a search, Google masks the referrer data by replacing it with: (not provided). Unfortunately, Google has been doing this for the last year or so and it is quite annoying.
The top keywords are “content targeting.”
”Content targeting” refers to Adwords campaigns (pay per click advertising). There are two types of traffic from paid search. One is keyword searches, which occur on the “Search Network” (when someone does a search on google.com and clicks your ad. And the other is from the “Display Network” also known as the “Content Network”. This is when your ads are displayed on relevant third-party websites and the visitor clicks the ad to visit your site. “Content targeting” traffic is visitors who came to your website because they clicked an ad on a relevant third-party website.
What are some ways to get people to engage the site longer?
Perhaps a 30 second video on the home page would be engaging. If you had a simple explanation of what you do and then have a call to action at the end of the video, like “contact me now using the contact form below”, that could help to increase visitor engagement/interaction.
Next steps.
So, if you want to understand more about how visitors are using your website, contact Orion today to ask about our expert Google Analytics services.