Most of the sites I work on these days are on the small end of the scale, but a few are large news portals. One of them went through a site redesign a few months ago (before I got involved), and they’ve seen a large dropoff in traffic. I’m starting to look into why that happened, and wanted to share some ideas about how to fix the problem.
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, and check it often for clients’ sites, to see how things are going and get ideas about how to make improvements. One of the most frustrating stats for me is the “Bounce”. Today, I’ll show you a new tool for getting inside what happens during a bounce.
One of the great mysteries of Google Analytics is just why they won’t let us see referring URLs of our users. Probably some privacy concern of Google’s, but it’s easy as pie to get from web server logs, so I don’t understand the issue.
I’m so dependent on Analytics for day-to-day work that I really would prefer to have all the info in one place (Analytics) instead of having to integrate log-based reporting (and deal with clients asking why the two give different numbers!). Here’s how to do it:
I normally set up sites to just log 404s and check the log files for problems, which is fine for me, but hard for clients. Here’s how I recently set up a site so the client’s marketing folks could spot 404s on their own:
I've got a new tool & book available for advertisers who want to move from losing money to making money with AdWords. Check it out!
I'm a web developer, SEO and PPC guy in the midwest. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you find some useful info! You can follow me on Twitter @gcrocker.
