Use Google Analytics to Make Your Website Perfect

By: Tyler Oldham

Explaining bounce rates and how to improve them.

With approximately 1.5 billion websites available across the web, it’s understandably difficult to hold the attention of a visitor to your website. Also known as audience fragmentation, the simple fact is that as the Internet grows, it will be harder and harder to maintain your audience’s attention. Therein is just one of the many reasons it’s important to understand how to measure and visualize media analytics.

Improving your website is extremely important for staying relevant. One of the most effective ways of doing so is through Google Analytics. Even a complete beginner can use this simple tool to make their site as strong as possible.
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After you’ve got your account, property, and views set up, wait a few days (or even weeks) for your data to roll in. In my example, I’ll be using site data from a few days of the WSOE website. In order to find out which pages need the most work, the best place to look is your Behavior tab > Site Content > All Pages.

Here are three example pages. From top to bottom: our home page, an artist spotlight blog, and our broadcast schedule. The most important metric to focus on here is bounce rate and % exit. Your bounce rate for the page is the percentage of sessions with zero interactions. The % exit is the percentage of sessions that the user exited your site from. How about we take a look at each page and see what might explain this metric. ​

Home Page

Our home page (the “/” on the behavior dashboard) had a bounce rate of 33%. This means that 1/3 of our sessions had zero interactions on the page (clicks, comments, shares, etc.) This is an average bounce rate for the majority of sites, as some users just won’t be interested. However, it’s still just as important as to give the user multiple elements to interact with, in order to lower the bounce rate. Looking at the page, you’ll see that there are many elements to interact with: a slideshow of eye-catching article thumbnails, an embedded player of our broadcast, and a timeline of tweets from the WSOE Twitter. If a user clicks on any of those in a session, that makes the bounce rate of their specific session 0%. This also means that you get more pageviews, event actions, and session time. ​

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Bisexual Awareness Article

The second page on the list is an article from late-2020, a collection of artist spotlights in celebration of bisexual awareness month. The bounce rate for this site was 0%. Although there was a low sample size, all three of the sessions resulted in an interaction, and 2/3 of the users remained on the site after viewing the page (% exits). This is likely attributed to the ample use of hyperlinks in the text to redirect the readers to songs and other stories about the artists. We could improve this site by adding more links within the site to keep users engaged in our content.

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Show Schedule

This is our show schedule for our broadcast. You can access this page directly from our navigation. This bounce rate was a staggering 100%! This means that not one of the users interacted with the page in that session. The reason for this is very simple: there’s nothing to interact with. On an entertainment site, it’s important to have elements that encourage your users to interact with and subsequently remain engaged on the site. This page could include more clickable links, photos, and social media.

​In summary, it’s incredibly important to have engaging and interactive content in order to keep your users interested in browsing your site. Go check out the rest of www.wsoeelon.com and help us improve our bounce rates!

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