Understanding Visitor Retention with Google Analytics

Constantly digesting and spewing loads of data that reflect the performance of your web marketing initiatives is addictive. As marketeers and business owners, you can't avoid questioning your decisions to better increase your ROI through web marketing campaigns. Who cares that the the 'nth percentage of your Buffalo, New York traffic used the apostrophe version of your name, what will that get you? Most people overlook the simple things, such as how to focus their efforts to make the largest impact.

I feel that you can gain more insight to your website and future web initiatives by asking yourself one simple question,

"Do I want to gain or retain traffic?"

There are two main approaches to increasing your conversion rate, the first is to gain traffic and increase the number of unique visitors. This approach supports the idea that by increasing visitors to your site, as will an increase in conversions. Tailoring your marketing initiatives to this approach is fairly straight forward.

You can use a variety of "Traffic Sources" reports, to better identify a short and long term strategy to gain traffic. Simply pairing a strategic paid search campaign along side an aggressive organic search campaign can bring you the increase in traffic you are looking for. Even though many webmasters and marketeers have this idea or theory logged in their brains, there are numerous holes to it. Simply put, who cares how many uniques you gain every month if 75% hit the back button! That is just silly traffic.

This brings up the often neglected approach to increasing conversion rates - understanding your website well enough to increase the visitor retainment. Since most websites don't even reach a 1% conversion rate, getting your traffic to stick around long enough to convert is a real challenge. So how do you identify your visitor retention? First we need to identify who these visitors are. By cross-segmenting your return-visitors report by a specific traffic source, you can begin to identify sources that are under performing. Once we have identified a specfic source that is sending traffic with low retention or a high bounce rate.

 

The next step is to create a dedicated profile for each campaign or source that is showing signs of concern, this will allow you to "bucket" data.

Once you have created dedicated profiles for the sources and/or campaigns with high bounce rates, you can drill deeper to gain a huge understanding of the visitor's footprint & interaction with your website.

 

You can now focus on the main metrics that will give clear insight to increase your sites visitor retention.

Visitor Distribution and Recency

 

Are you losing majority of these visits within the first 10 seconds, while majority of the pageviews are simply 1 page deep? These metrics allow you to visualize the entire distribution of visits instead of simply relying on the average pageviews per visit. By applying this report to the "bucketed" profile, you are lowering the chance to have skewed results for this particular metric.

Interpreting the visitor footprint is extremely useful when identifying solutions to increasing visistor retention. By identifying pages in your Top Content report with under performing bounce rates, you can begin to drill down to your page optimization techniques. Identify a page that is under performing in the Navigation Summary report and visualize the users experience.

Where are they getting stuck or confused? Are you offering a clear Call To Action?

 

You may even want to consider making this approach the first priority. Ultimately, by focusing on the source of low performing traffic, segmenting that data into a dedicated profile and analyzing key performance indicators, you will have a solid understanding of how well your site is retianing visitors. So rather than investing in new marketing initiatives that may bring your site a giant leep in traffic, you may want to look at what you can be doing better to improve conversions and retain existing traffic.

Best,

Jonathan Georger

Director of Search Engine Marketing