There are a lot of stats to look at when viewing Google Analytics and average session duration is one of them. This article will cover what is average session duration and why bloggers should care about it. Even if you’re not a blogger, you may want to read in on this.
How to link Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics
You can link Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics? Why yes you can! In doing so, it allows you to integrate all the services of each into one big tool to measure the behavior of your site’s traffic. This allows you to dig deeper into how people are searching your website so you can see what they are looking for the most. Aside from their capabilities, the great thing about having both of these tools are that they are absolutely free. The only thing you need to do in order to take advantage of them, are to sync them together.
This article will show you how to link Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics.
How Important are Pageviews for Bloggers?
If you’re a new blogger or have been around the block some, pageviews are really important. If you’re not paying attention to your website’s stats, then you’re missing out on a lot of things that could make you money. Money or any return on investment is important for a lot of bloggers, whether the blogger is a professional or writing on a website as a hobby. In this article, we’ll cover how important are pageviews for bloggers.
Google Analytics: How to Set Up a Simple Goal
Google Analytics provides a great feature for website owners to be able to track specific campaigns, also called a goal. It can be places on pages, forms, or anything you are wanting to track for to see if a campaign has an effective website conversion. It also tracks how the visitor arrived to the area you want to convert.
This works great after you’ve tried A/B Testing so you can verify the results from live traffic. In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a simple goal in Google Analytics.
Average Session Duration – What is it and Why Bloggers Should Care
In Google Analytics, one of the statistics measures is average session duration. In simple terms, this is the amount of the time that a person spends on your website. This article will help you understand average session duration and if you’re a blogger, perhaps persuade you to take a better look into this piece of information.
As an extra goodie, there will be a few brief tips to hopefully get those visitors to stay longer.
Average Session Duration – What is it and Why Bloggers Should Care
As mentioned before, the average session duration is the average time of all the time spent on your site by your visitors. This time is usually a great indicator of how interested people are with the content on your website, regardless if it is something you are selling or not.
The smaller the number that the average session duration is, means that you’ve got a lot of work to do in either jazzing up your content, or creating new articles that your visitors are truly interested in seeing. You also would need to try to entice those visitors to stay on your website longer.
For example, if your visitors are only on your website for less than a minute and a half, you probably need to be concerned. Of course, Google Analytics has other tools you can look at after looking at your average session duration statistic. Usually you will want to check out where the visitors are coming to your site and where they are leaving. If the entrance and exit of your website, especially a blog, is the front page, then you’ve got a problem with the front of your website.
Possible Problems that Could be the reason for a poor Average Session Duration stat
- Poor Navigation – If you don’t give people a clear path in order to navigate your website, they probably won’t go any further than the front page, or if you’re lucky, one article.
- The design is undesirable. – A lot of people are visual. If your people can’t identify with you and remember you, they might not be back. Some bloggers who choose minimalistic designs often sacrifice their branding.
- There are no effective calls to action. – If you are giving people a reason to come back, they won’t. Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter. Encourage the to follow you on the social networks. Encourage them to use your contact form or click on your about page to learn more about you and what your website is about.
- The articles have boring titles. – People aren’t enticed to click on and read articles that are unappealing. Be concise and try to think of what spurs you on to clicking and reading a blog post based on the title. You can learn a lot from visiting leaders in your niche to see what’s most effective.
- The website is just confusing. – If people don’t know what your website is about, and why they should be there rather than some other site, then they won’t be back. Give them a reason. If you’re not sure, go back to your original site focus plan and tweak it.
- No plan to keep visitors once they’ve clicked deeper into the website. – Once people are within your website, whether it’s a blog post, or your shopping cart, or landing page, you need to keep them there. Entice them with linking to other articles within your site, in your post’s content. You could also benefit from either showing some most recent posts or related posts, or both.
Average duration session is definitely an important factor in website conversion. The goal is to keep them there as long as possible because that WILL get the subscriber, the social share, the commentator, and above all, THE SALE!
Do you pay attention to your average session duration stat for your website?
Getting a Handle on Site Speed
One of my greatest challenges has been to convince clients that they have a slow loading site AND that a slow loading website reduces the number of sales or leads they can expect to get.
I’ve shown them the pretty waterfall charts that show that their site loads in 6.7 seconds – only to have their eyes glaze over.
I touch on it when we’re reviewing their Google Analytics and pointed out that page load times are now part of Google’s search algorythm – and still no response.
Then I discovered a secret weapon….the video of a site loading from webpagetest.org. There is nothing like seeing a blank screen while those seconds tick off to convince clients that site speed is important.
Site speed test from Webpagetest.org. Notice how at 1.4 seconds 0% loaded and at 1.7 seconds 67% is loaded
Why Page Load Times Matter
According to the research firm Aberdeen Group Inc., a 1-second delay in web page load time translates into a 7% loss in conversions. This means that for each 10,000 in monthly sales, you stand to lose $700 or $8,400 per year.
We all want websites with cool features that attract attention and hold interest. But if that technology causes delays or fails to work properly, visitors won’t wait around….they’re off to something else.
Tag Man in partnership with glasses e-retailer Glasses Direct ran a test to study page speed and conversion behavior.
As expected, the study found that page-load speeds impacted conversion rates. The conversion rate peaked at about two seconds, dropping by 6.7% for each additional second.
Conversions peak at 1-2 second load times. Source Tagman case study of Glasses Direct
Two studies by Akamai and Gomez are frequently cited in reports on site speed. Both reports are several years old now, but what are the odds that visitor expectations have gone down?
The Akamai Study published in September 2009 interviewed 1048 online shoppers and reported the following:
- 47% of the people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load
- 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.
Remember this was 2009….with all the advances we’ve seen in technology and the emphasis on reducing page load times – do you believe that a site that takes over 2 seconds to load won’t impact visitor behavior?
Two interesting additional points came out of the The Gomez Report published in 2010 which interviewed 1500 consumers about their opinions:
- 58% of mobile device users expect sites to download as quickly as they would on their home computers
- 61% of mobile users said that poor performance would make them less likely to visit the mobile website again.
If you’re like most website owners, mobile traffic to your site is rising. It’s common to see 25% or more of your website visitors coming from mobile devices. Are you meeting your customer’s expectations for quick page load times on mobile devices? Probably not.
Responsive Design and Site Speed
In a month-long study of 12 e-retail responsive design sites conducted by Keynote, ¹ reported that the average load times by device were:
- Desktop PCs 3.14 seconds (high-speed connections)
- Tablets 2.8 seconds (high-speed connections)
- Smart Phones 18.24 seconds (combination 3G and 4G connections)
The companies interviewed spent a lot of time, money, and effort in designing, building and tweaking their sites for mobile visitors.
As Mike Clem, vice-president of e-commerce at Sweetwater commented, templates with a “one-size-fits-all” approach carry a lot of additional, unnecessary code and this slows performance, because all that code has to load before the visitor can see the page on their desktop, tablet, or smartphone.²
What to do next?
Start by getting a clear idea of your site’s page load times. Get a combination of data from Webmaster Tools, Google Analtyics and services like YSlow, WebPageTest, and Pingdom. Look for commonalities to figure out what’s slowing down your site and pick off the biggest offenders first. A good developer can be of tremendous help here.
Next tackle the core of the problem. You’ll never cure poor site speed by tinkering around the edges of your website. For a WordPress site, this would include the following:
- A clean theme with clean code – get rid of that unnecessary code. If you can afford a custom theme written specifically for your site, great – if you can’t, make sure that the template you use doesn’t carry a lot of excess baggage.
- Switch off all the plugins you don’t need or use. Watch the page load times on the plugins you use and switch out of load-time hogs if you can.
- Optimize images and graphics – Size your images before you load them into wordpress – if you can get away with lower resolutions without loss of quality, you’ll save some seconds.
- Fast web hosting configured specifically for WordPress along with a caching strategy
Site speed is an ongoing challenge. As you make changes to your site, update plugins and themes and add additional features – be sure to test the impact on your site speed.
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¹ Siwicki, Bill. “The Ugly Truth about Responsive Design (and how to fix it).” Internet Retailer June 2014: 42-54. Print.
² Siwicki, Bill. “The Ugly Truth about Responsive Design (and how to fix it).” Internet Retailer June 2014: 42-54. Print.
Understanding Google Webmaster Tools
As much as you might think Google is making it hard to get traffic, they really aren’t. They have tools like Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. The difference between the two are the fact that Google Analytics measures your traffic, and Google Webmaster Tools tells you how Google actually sees your website.
This article is written to help you understand Google Webmaster Tools better. In fact, this article is part of a series, so there will be other parts to check out so you can become more familiar with Google Webmaster Tools.
What Do You Do After You First Apply Google Anayltics to Your Website?
When you get into creating and managing a website, at some point you’re going to hear about Google Analytics, especially being told you need to have it on your website. Regardless if you’re a blogger, a small business owner, or a big corporate business, you do need a tool to measure your site’s progress. Google Analytics just happens to be a good one that is also free to use.
So…
Does Alexa Rank Really Matter?
Alexa is known as a site that offers website analytics and even ranks sites based on traffic. A lot of website owners that are concerned about Alexa rank, aren’t entirely certain what it is, and if it really matters? And if it does matter, who does it matter to?
This article will answer those questions.
Panda 4.0 – Time to Wake Up!
If you’ve been hoping to slide with mediocre content, or can’t identify what mediocre content is, your site will be in for a scary surprise, SEO-wise. Panda 4.0 is here! For several years, Google has been trying to make website owners aware that unique and quality content is the key to getting ahead.
While many have talked the talk, they’ve never walked the walk in terms of improving their content. There are thousands of sites built to cater toward bloggers, Internet Marketers, and many other niche. So, how can you get your site out of the content doldrums and come out on top of your niche? So, if you didn’t get these updates before, what is Google Panda 4.0?