Benchmarking Your Blog

Ever wonder just how well your blog performs when compared to other blogs and Web sites of similar size and category?  Learn how to analyze your blog’s usage statisticts with Google Analytics to learn exactly how it performs against industry benchmarks.

There are all kinds of Blog stats programs available for the various blog applications.    WordPress.com stats still is the most popular WordPress Stats plugin and many more can be found on via the word press plugin directory by clicking on the WordPress Stats tag.  There are several stats extensions for BlogEngine.Net, yet I have yet to find an all in one stats package for BlogEngine.Net. Web site usage statistics analysis does not only apply to blogs however and the information in this post can be applied to any Web site.

Although these stats programs can help you track various things, such as page load times, referrers, what key phrases your site shows up in search engines, outbound clicks, and downloads, the all come short when it compares your blog or Web site’s performance to other blogs and web sites.  The problem is they don’t really share the data they collect with other installation on other people’s blogs.

Enter Google Analytics to provide the solution for benchmarking your blog or Web site.  For those who aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, it is the industry standard Web site analytics programs and is constantly updated with great new features.

So Why Do I need to Analyze My Blog?

Well, for those of us who have OCD, knowing who is coming to our blog, where they are coming from and where they go once they get to our blog is simply a burning desire that we need to satisfy.  For the rest of us, intermittently review your blogs performance and comparing it to the performance of other blogs can make sure they we have not lost focus on delivering or visitors with relevant content to their interests.

Furthermore, a good Analytics program can help us identify issues with our blogs and Web sites that we may not have otherwise known existed.  By reviewing our sites usage statistics we can see what content users are interested and what content they are not.   We can also measure the performance of the different tactics where are using to get readers to come to our blog.

For those who use Pay Per Click Marketing you can use Google’s Analytics to measure the effectiveness of you various campaigns, the compare conversion rates of various landing page, and identify issues that are causing visitors from purchasing your products and services.

How Can Benchmarking Help Identify Site Issues?

I’ll give you an example, using this very blog, which is actually the inspiration for this article.  When I logged into my Google Analytics account the other day, I saw a little alert asking if I would like to enable Benchmarking by anonymously sharing data with other Google Analytics users.  Curious in what new information I would learn, I enabled it.

Well the benchmarking data just became available to me my Analytics account today. When I first logged into my blog, I noticed that yesterday was the highest day of traffic in my blog’s short 1 month history, getting a total of 81 visits, largely due to the 82 views of my BlogEngine.Net Vs WordPress Comparison in the last two days.

This was all good, as new visitors are beginning to discover my blog and subscribe to my feed. But when I clicked on the new benchmarking link in the visitors section, I noticed that the my bound rate  had spiked, and skyrocketed above the benchmark of all other similar sized sites.  It was 26% greater than the Google’s Benchmark site.

My Google Analytics Bounce Rate Was Spiking

I also notice that while blog’s bounce rate was spiking  though the roof, my overall page views has increased while the pages per visit had decreased.

While my Pageviews where increasing and Pages/Visit where dropping.

At first I did not find this alarming, because from past experience I know that stats will often fluctuate but usually end up form a similar pattern.  But what really raised the alarm is when I checked out the that average length of visit under Visitor Loyalty.

Most visits lasted: 0-10 seconds

I am fortunate to the protege of the Internet marketing genius Larry Bailin.  Larry, the CEO of my company Single Throw, points out in his best selling marketing book, “Mommy Where Do Customers Come From?”, you only have 6-8 seconds to convince your sites visitors to stay on your site.  And evidently my blog just wasn’t connecting to my visitors.

But why?  I have great content, and the majority of visitors where landing on the BlogEngine.Net Vs WordPress blog entry.  The where landing on the page after performing a similar search or clicking a link on another site that clearly stated what they would find on that link.  But still, they 62% of my visitors where leaving within the first 10 seconds of landing on my blog, which was up from only 30% the day before.

Time to do step in the shoes of a visitor.  Designing each of your pages in a way that will connect to visitors when they first come to your site is a job that is best left to professionals.

I immediately go though a check list of landing page usability factors to see if I can pin point the source of the high bound rate:

1. When a visitor lands on a page, do they immediately know what the page is about? In my case, I have to say yes. My blogs huge headline immediately informs every visitor they are on “Alex Higgins Blog”, the personal blog of an Asp.Net Developer.
2. Can they immediately find the information they came to your web site for? Again, Immediately beneath the huge “Alex Higgins Blog” headline, there is another headline that says “BlogEngine.Net Vs WordPress”.  Clear the article is above the fold, smack in their face.
3. Have you made it clear what you want your visitor to do once they land on a page? Designing effect call to actions that inspire your visitor to take some sort of action is key to the success of any web page.  When visitor land on this article my primary call to action is to have them read the article.  Secondary call to actions include enticing the visitor to leave a comment, to subscribe to my blogs feed, link to the articles, and to share the article with friends via the various social bookmarking sites.�These call to actions are clear on my blog and just about any other blog for that matter.  After all that is what blogs are designed for.
4. If your Call To Actions do not satisfy your visitors needs, have you provided visitors with suitable alternatives? Many Web sites fail in this factor, and overall it is probably one of the highest causes for visitors to leave your site.�A prime example, is when a user searches for something, and their search results return nothing.  If a visitor is presented with a message saying there where no results for their search with no alternatives, they will usually try searching for another phrase or simply leave your site.  A well designed Web page will provide visitors with viable alternatives.   Such alternatives include suggesting some of most popular search terms, suggesting similar search phrases, and notifying the user when they have misspelled a query.404 error pages should do the same. Instead of simply displaying an error saying page not found a well designed Web site will suggest a list of pages where a visitor may find what they where looking for and possibly even display a site map outlining some of the primary content on the Web Site.  I would soon find out that a a combination of this issue and issue #5 seemed to be the cause for the unexpected spike in my blogs bounce rate.
5. Does the web page follow standard well know conventions? When a user first lands on your page, they will decide wether or not they will leave within 10 seconds.  If your site does not follow well known conventions, you can be sure that your site will have a high bounce rate.�Some Examples of Well Know Conventions:
   
   1. A consistent banner or logo on the top left hand corner of your Web page.
   2. Maintaining a consist look and feel for every page on your web site
   3. Showing your visitor where they are within your site at all times.  This entails letting them know where they have been, where they currently are, and how to get where they are going.  Traditionally breadcrumbs, expandable navigation, and changing the colors of visited and active hyperlinks help to accomplish this.  Another popular method is to use Tabs to indicate a users current location.
   4. Web pages should load fast.  A large portion of Internet users still use Dial-up modems.  Do not overload your site with graphics or flash that will cause the page to take to long to load.

   As you will soon read, a few of these issues where the blame for the huge spike in my blogs bounce rate.

When testing my site from my personal laptop, It passed all of these tests.  So I decided to Remote Desktop into a server at work and see if my I had a consistent user experience over the Internet using an older browser.  I point my browser to my blogs home page, and it still loaded fast.  But I notices something was missing.  My entire sidebar navigation was missing in Internet Explorer 6.

Not having a consistent sidebar navigation on every page violates several usability principals and best practices, especially in point 5 and 6 above.  In fact, one of the first things I did when I installed WordPress was to figure out how to make the sidebar show on all pages.

I then realized what was causing the rendering issue. When I  tested a new WordPress theme yesterday it messed up the HTML Markup in my existing blog posts.  So I then restored the original default WordPress theme.  However, the damage had been done I was stuck with an RTL stylesheet has some cross browser compatibility issues.  Then I tested my blog design in multiple browsers, I discovered that my blog was not rendering the side bar in  a few various browsers, including FireFox 3.0.  Even worse was rendering nothing at all in a few browsers.

Now that I know the issue causing the high visitor bounce rate my next task will be redesigning my blog.  However, if it hadn’t been for Benchmarking my blog, I probably would have never learned there where issues causing 6 out of 10 visitors to leave within the first 10 seconds of landing on my blog.

More about Google Analytic Benchmarking

Benchmarking your web pages can accomplish much more than reduce the number number visitors bouncing from your site on their initial visit.  The Benchmark tool allows you compare your site side by side to the average of other sites the size of yours, in various categories.  By comparing your site to other categories you may end up switching your blog or web sites focus to a topic that has more traffic.

Whether you choose to compare your site against a particular benchmark category against all sites that are anonymously sharing the Analytics data, there are currently 6 different benchmarks available for comparison.

Analyzing the Visits Benchmark

This is simply the total number of visitors that have come to your web site.  Note that since Google Analytics uses JavaScript this number will be lower than Log File based analytic tools.  The JavaScript will only load when a real visitor visits your site not a robot or search engine crawler.  Further, the analytics code is usually placed at the very bottom of your web page, which means that it will not load until all other HTML has been sent to your visitors browser.

What the visits benchmark means
If your sites total visits count is below the benchmark, it could be due to several reasons.  First, many sites in the benchmark as using Pay Per Click Advertising which means they are paying for a lot of their site’s traffic.  If you site is relatively new, as in the case of my blog, you should expect your number of visits to be below the benchmark.  If your site has been around for a while and you are constantly performing below your categories benchmark this can indicate there are some major issues with your site.  Each site is different so under performance can be caused by several issues.

1. Is your site linked well with other sites? A good measure of this can be found by reviewing how much of your traffic comes from referring sites in your Google Analytics dashboard.  Additionally, I often use a tool like Widexl’s link popularity checker to see the number of links coming into my site.  Make sure people can find your sites by putting links to your site on other sites with content related to your site.
2. Is your site showing up in search engines? Again, you can check your analytics account to see what portion of traffic comes to your site from search engines.  Additionally, you can review the keywords that visitors searched for to find your site.  If your search engine traffic is low, it can be caused by any of the following issues:�
   1. Does your site have poor search engine optimization? This seems like such a simple thing to do but its really not.  Good SEO requires that you perform professional marketing research, not only to identify your target market and learn the language they are using, but also to learn the phrases they are using to find the products, services or information that your web site offers.  Many sites use professional firms like mine to perform their Search Engine Optimization.  This makes your chances of showing up well in search engines even harder.
   2. Are search engine having problems finding your content? In order for your pages to show up in search engines, you need to make sure that they are linked to from other pages on the Internet.  It is easy enough to link to your pages from within your own web site.  However odds are your pages will not show up in a search engines results unless they are linked to from an external site.  Furthermore, poor site design such as spider traps and not paying attention to the the conventions you use in creating permalinks can prevent search engines from indexing your content. Again, you can use a tool like Widexl’s Search Engine Saturation Checker to see how many pages are in each search engine’s index.

There are still 4 other benchmarks I haven’t discussed: PageViews, Average Time On Site, Pages per Visit, and New Visits.  I will discuss them each in detail in a future post.

How do you interpret these benchmarks?  What kind of inferences can you draw from them?  Let us know.