Analysing Navigation Paths And Bounce Rates

Valuable data for identifying problems within a site

[gypsychild]

I have in the past always concentrated my time on optimising for the search engines and of course, always been pleased when visitor numbers have increased. However, I had no idea at all what people actually did once they were on my site.

Recently however, I have been looking at navigation paths for each visitor and bounce rates per page and found this information invaluable in discovering many people were not actually going where I wanted them to go or in fact, anywhere at all. From the information gathered, I have gradually made changes to my site, many of them only minor and little by little, I see that I am getting people to where I want them. I have identified problems with navigation, download time of images, optimising for the wrong keywords and more. There is still lots to do, but looking back, the energy I put into optimising should perhaps have firstly gone into this, as I can see now there were many missed opportunities.

At the end of the day, I should be thinking of my site as a shop - if potential customers come through the door and turn around and walk out again, something is wrong. Basically if they're not even getting to look at the products, I'm not going to be selling to them - an opportunity gained, but then immediately lost.

[heini]

Yep, a very important point.
Raw traffic means little or nothing today. It's a thing of the banner ad age ;)
Targeted traffic, communicating to the people interested in what you offer, be it services, products or information, that's the goal of web publishing.

Anylzing logs carefully tells very much about a site and what should be improved.
The usability of a site gets mirrored in log files.
Even the very content can be improved by log analysis.

[Finder]

Any tips on how to analyze traffic patterns to get that information?

I am very interested. I've noticed site visitors doing odd things, but can't figure out what they are thinking. Do they not realize that certain links are links? Is my navigation system too complicated? It would be nice to sit someone down and just look over their shoulder so I could ask them!

[gypsychild]

Heini, I couldn't agree with you more. The emphasis these days and quite rightly so is on optimising for Google (myself included). Perhaps though, just for a moment and after all the hard work, we should also be looking at how best to make use of the traffic we already have and of course, any extra we have gained from our Google optimisations. It's easy to sit there and think how good it is to have doubled our visitors, but if we're not making good use of them, then surely this essentially is time wasted. I would think it very easy to be somewhat blinkered when looking at the success of a web site, far more so perhaps than in a physical environment, ie, if you succeeded in getting 1000 people to walk into your shop, but only 1 buys, surely you would be asking yourself why. I wonder though if we actually apply this same thinking to our web sites.

Finder, well if you are looking at navigation paths, you will of course never know what the visitor is actually thinking or find any clear cut answers as to what might be wrong. However, I would just say that if they're not going where you want them to go, then it's just a question of trial and error - it could be down to your navigation, slow loading pages, misdirected search terms or possibly other factors.