At Brand Pixel, we talk to a lot of people about websites and how to increase traffic to your content. Our clients and partners cover the complete range of sites available on the web, from personal blogs to major corporate websites and everything in between. Our expertise in Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Optimization goes a long way toward increasing traffic to your site, but we’ve found its all too easy for even the most well intentioned manager to get bogged down and distracted by “hit tracking”. That’s our term for the habit site owner’s form of watching “hits” to their site usage reports and ignoring other potential key factors.

Its true that hits are one of the most important factors to monitor. However, a tunnel vision focus on that will leave other critical indicators to deteriorate. In our experience we’ve found one of the most often ignored metrics is the Bounce Rate per page (wiki link). This is the percentage of visitors who visit a page or website and leave without visiting another page in the site.

Your analytics software should be able to show you a list of all pages and their Bounce or Exit rate. Find the top 5 highest Exit pages and take a look at the content on those pages. If your sites been live for a while you may be surprised how out of date those pages are. Are they offering the user the content they expect? Can changing a page title or button location help with usability? Simple changes can have a surprising impact on reducing bounces.

As always, we’re here to help. Give us a call and we’ll put you in touch with one of our analytics experts for a free lesson. 949.273.4777

Resources:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/stop-bouncing-tips-for-website-success.html

The speed and style of communication and socializing is changing so it’s natural to see new trends slowly taking over. Social networking Web sites have given small businesses the boost they needed to generate traffic to their organization as well as get the word on the latest news out to their customers.

About 67% of the global internet population are blogging, visiting social networks and starting to make these uses more mainstream than regular email. This usage of blogging via social network(ing) sites is showing no signs of slowing down.

As one of the main things that keeps small businesses alive is their ability to look ahead of current trends. So we’ve decided to give you a few important facts on the impact of social networks in our society.

-Social network and blogging audience has increasingly become more diverse. The biggest increase of visitors in 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites came from 35-49 year old age groups (+11.3 MILLION).

-Usage of mobile technology to visit a social network has increased in the US up 156% (10.6 million) these are major increases compared to last year

-Over the last year, social networking has become the 4th most popular online category according to Nielsen Online

So you started a twitter account? Congratulations! You’ve taken the first of many small steps into the social media world. Twitter is a fantastic community where people share not only their stories, but also share news, get questions answered and forge fantastic networks. You may be asking yourself at this point though, “How do people do all that with just 140 characters?” The answers are aggregation, API, and search.

Twitter by itself is unmanageable unless you have less than 50 contacts that aren’t updated constantly. But then, what’s the point? You want to get the most up to the minute news before it’s on cnn.com, enhance your recruitment and retention, and know when your friends are getting together tonight for a movie all in one place, right? This is where all of these things come in.

Search is the most under utilized feature twitter has to offer, in our opinion. Most people who use twitter will never find it unless someone else tells them about it first. Part of this is because of the feature’s placement on the twitter website, part of this is because when friends tell you is the only way most people find out about the option.

To utilize search on twitter is a very simple process. If our family can all do it, you can too! Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the web browser window you have twitter open in. There will be a bar of words that all link to various pages associated with twitter. Click on “Search”. A new page will appear that looks a lot like the Google homepage. Type anything imaginable into that search bar.

Want to see what people are saying about your school’s mascot or sports teams? Type it in. (Jayhawk is always a good one to test this out with ;)). Want to know what people think of the stimulus package? Type “stimulus”.

The key to search on twitter is to keep things simple. Use single words whenever possible to collect the most tweets possible. Using the common root (consult for consulting, consultant, consultation) will gather all of the tweets where that root appears. After you pick a topic to learn about, a feed of tweets will appear with every tweet that mentioned that word in the most recent history.

Search allows you to find up to the second information on any topic imaginable. When anywhere from 3.5 to 4.5 million people use twitter and the number has been growing exponentially in the past several months, it allows for you to view a microcosm of the world’s thoughts and opinions on the topic. In upcoming entries we’ll teach you how to search tweets by location to see what your neighborhood or city is interested in, how to utilize hashtags, how to generate statistics using twitter aggregation and how to manage your twitter feed using third-party APIs.

For now, Happy Searching Tweeple!