I am looking at top ranking blogs (landing pages). Google analytics is telling me that I have a high % of new sessions. But the percentage of total sessions on the site they account for is low (15%). Why is this?
perhaps this is one of those cases to which the 85/15 Rule applies.
RhinoFish
11:14 pm on May 7, 2021 (gmt 0)
On your blog pages, your content strategy to acquire new visitors is working. :-)
When they make a habit of returning, you have something else they are visiting.
ldcc
6:12 am on May 8, 2021 (gmt 0)
Thank you! Can you explain what the 85/15 rule is?
phranque
8:16 am on May 8, 2021 (gmt 0)
Can you explain what the 85/15 rule is?
this is way oversimplifying things, but in a few dozen words or less:
<statistics>in a normal distribution, the 85th percentile occurs at one standard deviation above the mean</statistics>
because of this, it is often true that 85% of X causes 15% of Y, or vice versa.
NickMNS
2:07 pm on May 8, 2021 (gmt 0)
<statistics>in a normal distribution, the 85th percentile occurs at one standard deviation above the mean</statistics>
The 85/15 rule, is typically referred to as the 80/20 rule. And it stems from the Pareto distribution. The Pareto distribution is most often associated with wealth in society, as it comes from a study by Economist Vilfredo Pareto that showed that 20% of the people held 80% of the wealth (in 1898).
The Pareto distribution looks very different from a normal distribution. The normal (PDF) is the very familiar bell curve, whereas the Pareto distribution looks like a hokey stick. What normal means is that events become less likely the further away they are from the mean. Whereas for Pareto events are clustered at one extreme.
Back to Anayltics, what this means is if you have 100 webpages, then users are only landing on 20 of those pages but from those 20 they fan out to others. (In this case it is 15% not 20%). Note if it were a normal distribution then nearly all the pages would be landing pages, but some would get more traffic than others, and few pages would get very little traffic.
More on Pareto distribution: [en.wikipedia.org...] Note: you can skip the math, just look at the charts and read section 5.
ldcc
6:05 pm on May 8, 2021 (gmt 0)
Thanks so much - very helpful
RhinoFish
8:36 pm on May 8, 2021 (gmt 0)
Dr. Vilfredo Pareto was only right like 20% of the time... but when he was right, man what a difference it made... :-)
