Web analytics. The Tale of Denial

I am constantly confronted with the fact that the “analytics” item in the plans of advertising campaigns even on the Internet is infrequent.

Some knowingly delete the same "Metric" from sites. "Yandex will lower us in the issuance!". Yeah, that's what he needs.

In my opinion, in the matter of attracting, retaining visitors to the site and achieving the goals of its advertising, analytics is more than half the success in work. In our company, now this stage of work takes about 30% of the time from all the events held as part of website promotion.

I want to share some of the key points that will increase visitor loyalty, credibility in search engines and save on useless advertising.

Indicator ... what?

Recently, I often hear some performers telling customers with a smart look: “Crash on the site! You have them very large! ”, Referring to the percentage of people who immediately leave the site by looking at only one page.

In general, you can use this indicator for something. But in reality, failures are a more specific quantity associated with an action . For example, a visitor came to the site, but did not fill out a feedback form or put the goods in the basket, but did not pay for it.

Only on the basis of the analysis of such failure indicators can specific recommendations be made. And what can be advised based on the number of single views? Something like "improve your site."

In addition, the visitor could come to the product description page, see the price and its description, and leave. He achieved his goal, which means that this cannot be considered a failure.

Visitors vs search engines

And now we will connect all this with two factors: the loyalty of visitors and the success of search engine optimization.

The first increases the conversion, the second - the inclusion of user behavior in improving the visibility of the site in the results of search engines.

The metric takes into account a lot of indicators, such as a click map and accounting for the time spent on the page. Conditionally: if a visitor came and looked at one page on the site, but at the same time used scrolling or clicked on some elements, this is no longer a failure.

From the point of view of the visitor, this is leaving the site in the case when he did not find the necessary information, i.e. "I didn’t get there."

Taking into account the recent months and a noticeable decrease in the influence of external links on the success of the promotion, the following picture is obtained: you need to really make a high-quality website and ensure that the page the visitor came to answers his question as fully as possible .

Improving by reducing failures

So, what can we analyze:
1. Failures on specific pages
2. Failures on the sources of visitors
3. Failures on search phrases

If a page is often left, perhaps something is wrong with it. The option is likely when a person came to a completely left page, which should not have been included in the search engine index. For example, a document with empty search results or an admin login form.

These pages need to be closed from indexing in robots.txt. For you, this is not only a decrease in the overall bounce rate for the site, but also, in a sense, security from "hacker-schoolchildren" who, for the sake of fun, are looking for sites on old and not updated engines for a long time.

In addition, the presence of useless documents in the index affects the overall relevance of the site, which also reduces its visibility in the search results.

So, we carefully stick it into the document, and if we don’t find anything strange and terrifying, then we look where people come to this page from.

We analyze the rejections for each source (for search engines - specific phrases), as well as the advertising materials used on them (for search engines - signatures to the site in the search results) and draw conclusions: which source of visitors is effective and which is not. Which advertising materials are made competently and which are not.

For search phrases. We look at inappropriate phrases (that is, obviously not of your subject), and on which pages on them come. If possible, we get rid of the mention of these phrases on the pages. We determine by target phrases whether the visitor comes to that page? If not, we optimize the necessary one, and if so, we determine how obviously this document answers a person’s question.

As a result, we get rid of stupid advertising and ineffective advertising materials, as well as search phrases. We save. We increase conversion.

I am sure this article will help many take a different look at the scope of website promotion. Do not consider everyone who works in it as spammers or “specialists” who sculpt documents that only robots can look at without a shudder.