Analytics tracking is essential for understanding the success of your SEO efforts. And services that provide automated traffic reports can simplify your life by providing the data in a dashboard with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. On the other hand, these services are not all the same, and there are some downfalls to automated traffic reports.

Benjamin Estes discusses his opinion of the organic traffic data monitoring offered by a few different services in “Challenges in Automated Traffic Reporting.”

Google Analytics:

This popular option is robust, free and, of course, based on Google’s very extensive data. It provides all the traffic data you could ever want, including keyword discovery (finding new keywords that people use to find your site). The only con that Estes sees is the lack of other SEO related data.

SEOmoz PRO Campaigns:

This paid service offers much less data than GA, but the three metrics reported are three of the most important when analyzing how a site is performing. They are Organic Visits, Number of Organic Keywords and Number of Organic Landing Pages.

StatsMix:

You submit your own data to this service, which stores it and displays is as numbers over time. It’s highly customizable, but requires significant effort from your development team.

Geckoboard:

Also highly customizable, you can use pre-built widgets or build your own API to retrieve and display your data. Again, it requires a significant investment of time and effort.

GinzaMetrics:

This one provides good traffic information, keyword tracking and even keyword discovery. Its biggest downfall is a very busy dashboard display.

These services are all worthwhile in their own ways, but you might need to test a few to find the best fit for your business. You will especially need to decide how much customization ability you want or need, especially if you don’t have a development team.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York car accident lawyer.

A metric that’s increasingly discussed is “bounce rate” – this is largely due to the fact that it’s featured as a statistic on the first report page of Google Analytics accounts. What is bounce rate, how is it useful and are there similar metrics that are useful for understanding your website?

In February 2009, the Official Google Blog released a two part post named The Power of Measurement (1)(2). In it, the idea of bounce rate is introduced by Avinash Kaushik and described simply as

It [bounce rate] measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!

In a later post Avinash went on to outline

It [bounce rate] is usually measured in two ways:

* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

So what’s that telling you? A high bounce rate means visitors are coming to your site, not seeing what they needed or expected and they leave. There are three main ways bounce rate is useful:

• Assessing Referrers – If you’re running any advertising or link placements, bounce rate is helpful for understanding which referring sites are sending low quality or mis-targeted traffic. (Go to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites to view the top offenders.)
• Weak Pages – You can also look at your individual pages’ bounce rates and determine if their tagging is mis-targeted or the content could be improved. (Go to Content, Top Landing pages to view the pages with the highest analytics bounce rate.)
• Poor Design – A high overall bounce rate can also be an indication that your website navigation is unclear or your calls to action are weak. Does your site really make it easy for visitors to find information and/or talk to you? The answer to this question is usually found in A/B testing of one design’s bounce rate vs another.

We’ve addressed the basics of the Google Analytics bounce rate statistic, but are there other website metrics that can serve similar or complementary purposes? (For argument’s sake, let’s say you are not using an analytics package that doesn’t feature this statistic.)

• Avg Time on Site / Avg Time on Page - most reporting systems will tell you how long the average visitor spends perusing your site. A low number usually indicates less engaged (potentially confused) visitors. Of course, you can drill down to the individual page statistics and look at each page’s avg time on page for a deeper view.
• Avg Page Views per Visitor – a very high level metric. Think of it this way: if you have a page views per visitor of 1, your bounce rate is 100%. Very generally speaking, the higher your average page views per visitor number, the more engaged or interested your website visitors are.
• Time on Site or Page Views by Referrer - like the two metrics directly above, this information can help identify referrers sending low quality traffic.

Overall, bounce rate is both a measurement of visitor quality and of your website’s targeting. Traffic sources or landing page content should be inspected accordingly. If you aren’t drinking the Google kool aid and don’t use Google Analytics, there are similar metrics available in nearly all traffic measurement packages. Use information like bounce rate, time on site and page views per visitor to initiate improvement measures, test those improvements and re-test to maximize the return you receive from the traffic your website receives.