Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I'm the web editor for a mental health charity and am concerned with the trends I've been seeing in GA and wanted to ask those of you with experience here what you thought, whether I should be concerned and what I can do to push numbers up.
The charity supplies advice to three different audiences, training courses for MH professionals, sells publications via a telephone orderline and has a helpline. I realise content is king and that most of you will say 'make more content and make it more interesting', however, I'm just wondering what other means would be worth looking into such as ad words etc.).
Since Oct last year when we launched, we had around 20,000 visits (15,000 unique visits) after the first month. That has been steadily decreasing over the months down to around 10,000 (just under 8,000 unique visits) today which fluctuations over the holiday periods, which I assume is normal because people go on holiday.
Over half of our traffic is direct, about 15% from referrals and the rest from search engines and the bounce rate has been steady - around 30-35%.
I've been setting up as many links with other relevant organisations as I can that has brought in about 140 extra visits a month, sent a few newsletters out and am currently building a microsite that I hope will boost the figures.
What other things can I do to get people interested?
Any advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Thanks
The first thing I would do would be to look for any anomalies in the traffic. Compare the entire month of October with August, for example, using GA's date comparison tool. Take a look at your traffic sources and see if there's any shifting going on. By that I mean, are some traffic sources spiking up at the expense of others? Take a look at your Browser report as well, did Firefox stop being counted between October and August? Sometimes there's quirks in the html that some browsers handle fine and others don't; maybe one was introduced at some point. Basically what you're looking for is anything that would point to a problem with the installation.
Feel free to sticky mail me the url of the site in question and I can take a quick look at it to see if anything jumps out at me.
Cheers,
epistable
I've PM'd you the site url. What I've seen has been a steady decrease in the amount of traffic visiting the site in general across the site, but I'll compare two months in more detail to see if I can see a pattern.
Pretty sure browser compatibility won't be an issue as the original web developers took quite a few steps to make it as browser-friendly as possible. I haven't seen any conflicts yet.
When you mention a problem with the installation, are you referring to installation of Google Analytics?
Thanks for your help
Yep, I was talking about the installation of Google Analytics. I took a look at the homepage and saw that it's not currently tagged with the Google Analytics tracking code. All the pages past the home page I clicked on were tagged however. This will affect your reporting in two ways:
1) If a visitor searches for "widget" on a search engine, lands on your home page, and then continues on to your site, they'll show up as a direct visitor and you'll have no idea that they searched for widget.
2) If your home page USED to be tagged in October, but the tags got lost in a site redesign, that may be causing part of the drop in traffic.
Here's how you check for scenario #2. Select a date range that includes the entire time your site has been active. Go into the "Top Content" report and look for a page by the URI of "/" (you'll probably want to use the search function on the bottom). Click on it and you'll see a graph of visits for the homepage. See if there was any sudden drop at any point.
Cheers,
epistable
As epistable said, check the traffic sources. Did you lose a major referrer? Did somebody de-list you?
If you get a lot of search traffic, have you lost some terms (i.e. fallen down the ranks)? Check for trends on various search terms.
Check how your site actually appears in search results - not just the rank. Is the title going to make the site seem relevant to searchers? Is the text blurb appropriate and compelling?
Once you know a little more about the nature of the decline, you can do some cost-effective, focused actions. If there are one or two really important search terms that you're not ranking for, do seriously investigate sponsored search, including for long-tail, niche terms. Don't necessarily choose Google AdWords - try to figure out where your target visitors tend to search. Mental health sites may tend to have more AOL visitors than most, for example.
Are you losing first-time traffic or return traffic? Content will influence return traffic more. Marketing gets the first-timers.
Also, I'm assuming that your conversions are dropping also? Or are you experiencing a decline in overall traffic while your key audience continues to show up?
PM me the site URL also?
I've noticed that my % of new visitors is fairly steady at 75%, which I'm assuming is poor considering the type of site we have?
I'm unsure what kind of stats would be considered 'normal' for a site this size - is there a website that compares webstats from different sites so I can get a grip of what figures I should be looking for? Or is that just a stupid question considering traffic varies so much?
I've had a look around the stats and here's a brief synopsis of what I've found. Do they reveal anything that I can look into further?:
- Traffic seems to be declining in all areas (there isn't one specific area of the site that's pulling traffic away from another area it seems)
- The homepage (unsurprisingly because the code isn't installed on it) has no stats attached to it - I'll be having strong words with the developers about that as it will have skewed the stats quite a bit - particularly as we measure newsletter responses and the homepage is often linked to directly.
- Referrers seem pretty much the same each month
- Most visitors are first-timers
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Browser stats (% and no. of visits):
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1. Internet Explorer
August 1, 2008 - September 1, 2008 7,563 81.34%
November 1, 2007 - December 1, 2007 16,009 85.83%
2. Firefox
August 1, 2008 - September 1, 2008 1,244 13.38%
November 1, 2007 - December 1, 2007 1,896 10.16%
3. Safari
August 1, 2008 - September 1, 2008 302 3.25%
November 1, 2007 - December 1, 2007 561 3.01%
