Trending Upward

Photo by:  Marcin Wichary

So I’m taking most of this week off to clean house. Yes. I’m serious. The *real* reason for the house cleaning is that my family is coming down next weekend with a toddler and someone who is allergic to cats (not the toddler) and I have two (cats, not toddlers).

In the middle of writing my lists (yes, multiple lists … I am a list writer) my mind began to wander to work. What are some of the “low hanging fruit” that we could clean up pretty quickly on our websites?

How can web analytics help us with this?

Let’s explore some ways to quickly clean up your online campaigns and/or websites using analytics as  a guide.

1. Identify your top entry pages with the highest bounce rates.

Stealing an Avinash idea – This is very easy to do and is very actionable as well. Remember that just because a page has a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a bad thing. If your page is  ”portal” page or a “non-sticky” page by design, then you can expect a high bounce rate.

If not, then you need to find out why users are bouncing. Is the page confusing? Are you attracting the wrong audience? Is it relevant for the wrong keywords (this can also be “wrong audience”). Dig deeper and find out the reason for the high bounce rate.

This could be as easy as changing terminology and re-structuring the content of your page. It could also be as complex as re-writing your page to be more relevant to what the users want to see on the page.

2. Dump your bad campaigns.

Look at the campaigns that are total losers, including PPC. This is where you need to look beyond the click-through. Using segmentation, look at the behavior of these low-converting campaigns. What *do* they do on the site (if anything)? Even if you’re getting incredible click-through rates for these campaigns, if they are not converting or engaging in your site in any way, there’s something wrong. Are they the wrong audience? If so, get rid of them.

There is another side to this, though. Do you have campaigns where there is low conversion rate but those users happen to be engaging in your site in other ways (using search, knowledgebase, clicking out to your social media sites, etc.)?

These users may be in the research stage of the buying cycle and may not convert right away. Heck, they may not convert for 6 – 12 months (and by that time their cookies have definitely been deleted!).

Obviously the endgame is the conversion. My point here is only to say that you should take a look at more than *just* conversion when it comes to your campaigns. Other metrics can give you some key insights as well.

3. Clean up those 404′s.

There are a number of ways to clean up possible 404′s (Google Webmaster Tools, Xenu Link Sleuth), but my favorite is to find the referrers to your custom 404 page. What’s great about the 404 page referrers report is that it can tell you what the most popular external links that go to 404 pages. If you have a site with a ton of pages (including legacy pages), then you may need to prioritize. This is a great way becuase it shows you the most “popular” links that go to 404s.

We’ve found that a lot of these outside pages are actually pages within our larger school website that point to either very old/outdated or wrong URLs. These are simple to clean up, just pick up the phone and give someone a call.

4. Give the people what they want!

Ok, so this isn’t really “cleaning house,” but it can be a quick way to give your users what they want. Obviously we want to make it easy for users to get to the information they need.

What about when those *needed* pages change depending upon the time of year? Do your most popular pages and top internal search terms change depending on the time of year? It always seems that about a month before finals, our numbers for certain terms (and the popularity of those pages) skyrocket. For example, right before finals the instances of the term “proctors” jumps as does the popularity of the page that explains about getting a proctor (our website handles our online degrees, so this a relevant term for our current students).

So, if you have a similar scenario for different times of year, make it easier for your users to get to those pages. Put links to these pages in prominent places on your most popular landing (entry) pages (updates section? news and events section? etc.) Then simply remove them after the fact.

These may or may not be events. Of course we always put up links to upcoming events, but what about easy ways to get to needed tools or pages at certain times of year?

So take a quick minute to make a list. What kinds of things can you clean up quickly on your website?

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