Connection Speeds of your Customers

Does your website have state of the art Flash, JavaScript, along with sharp, bright graphics that just glow with brilliance? If not, are you planning to build such a site?

If so, you may want to monitor the connection speed that your customers use to connect to you. Nothing is worse than building a lovely awe inspiring site only to find out that half your customers are still on dial up and bouncing off of your site because it takes too long to load.

Fortunately through the Visitors/Network Properties/Connection Speeds menu Google Analytics ® gives you a synopsis of the connection speed your visitors connect with and the corresponding bounce rate.

If you find that an unacceptable amount of visitors are bouncing off at lower connect speeds, it may be appropriate to have your web team address the load time of your site.

There are ways to accommodate all your visitors, allowing your information to go out to as many people as possible; making you a great web host.  

How do your customers view you?

One important metric that you can discover using Google Analytics® is what browsers your customers are using.

Unfortunately, Web coding, even when done properly according to standards, does not work the same in all browsers. Websites that work spectacularly in one browser may appear discombobulated in another browser or the site may crash altogether. A site that doesn't appear as designed is not what you want your customers to experience.

Knowing what browsers your customers use allows your web team to emphasize the testing of your site in those browsers your customers use.

The browser metric can be found by clicking on the bounce rate metric and then choosing browser capabilities from the menu on the left of the window.

Testing your site with the tools your customers use to access your site is an important step in keeping your virtual storefront looking spiffy and your customers happy. 

How's your bounce rate?

Bounce rate is one of the broadest measurements that can be made on a website. It represents how long customers who find your site, stay and enjoy your site.

Each person who comes to your site is like a customer who opens the door at your physical business. A high bounce rate means that the customers who are opening your door barely look around, and then decide that you are not what they need. Your bounce rate gives you an excellent indication of how well your website is performing.  

There's a lot of reasons why your bounce rate would be high:

• Your site is not performing well in search engines; as a result you are receiving customers looking for a tattoo artist while you are selling landscapes.
• Your site is haphazard and busy; making information difficult for your customer to locate; think of it as a junk shop in the physical world.
• Your site generates error messages or doesn't work in the customer's browser; compare to the physical world's ramshackle building where the customer opens the door and the knob falls off in his hand.
• Your content is not generating confidence or is displayed in a boring, uninteresting way; you need to hire better reception and sales/marketing staff in the real world.
• You don't give a customer a reason to stay; little or no displays showing services or goods. What does your business do? Why would I do business with you? 
• Your site is old and outdated;  Are you still open for business?   

Your bounce rate warns you that your site may have problems. Once a problem is identified, reporting of the typical indicators should show where the problem lies.

For example if your site is optimized for Internet Explorer but statistics show that a good percentage of your customers access your site using Opera, it may be prudent to have your web team verify how Opera handles your site. Or maybe a recent browser upgrade is affecting how your site is viewed.

Research can be performed using different content, keywords, and layouts. Using the various reports of indicators the web site can be tweaked to go with the optimal results.

Bounce rate is the most general and basic of indicators measuring your site. Because of its very basic nature it is a good place to start when judging your virtual storefront on the web.   

Google Analytics Metrics Visitor Traffic

Google Analytics is a very versatile and useful tool in measuring website performance; in determining just how effective your website is over time; and in developing ways your website can be improved.
  
Using Google Analytics your website traffic sources can be analyzed. Where does your traffic generate?

The blog that is charted in the picture was receiving little or no traffic. This is typical for a new blog that is waiting to be discovered. After a month or two of monitoring, the owner of the blog joined a consortium of other blogs that had subject matter similar to that represented on this blog.
   
In the chart pictured, 43% of the traffic on this site is generated from referring sites. Over all traffic is up 193.75% and the bounce rate has come down from around 90% to a more tolerable 67%. Traffic is improved and with further use of the metrics provided by Google Analytics this blog will move along even more.

Next time we will look at bounce rate as a metric.