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Google Analytics - Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric

Posted on 13. Apr, 2009 by admin.

I recently did a post on Bounce Rate and one of my readers pointed out that there’s a good video by Google by Avinash Kaushik on this subject. Most of the ideas in the video are discussed in my post, but I would definitely recommend that you view this. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in delving further into the world of web analytics visit Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog.

Around half-way through the video Avinash mentions that the Bounce Rate on the slide he’s discussing is great, but it’s very difficult to see what it is. I did some stopping and starting of the video to save you the trouble and it turns out that the rate is 31.7%.

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12 Wordpress Plugins That You Must Have

Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by admin.

I’m often asked for advice and help from both experienced and new Wordpress users and the questions mostly involve themes and plugins.  In this post I’ll  give my top 12 plugin picks.  My favorite plugins are always changing as I learn of new ones and find that I cannot live without them.  Plugin needs also vary depending on the project.

Plugin Central

To me this is the one essential plugin that every Wordpress installation MUST have. In fact, it should be your very first plugin and the only one you need to install via FTP. Why? Once you install this plugin, you never need to use FTP again to install plugins. I realize that Wordpress 2.7 has some functionality to automatically download plugins, but it doesn’t compare to Plugin Central.   Plugin Central is very simple and straightforward.   You simply enter the name of the plugin you wish to install and that’s it.  Plugin Central does all of the heavy lifting by downloading and installing the plugin for you.  You do need to get the name right and you also need to go to the main plugin page once the plugin is downloaded and be sure to ACTIVATE it.

You can enter as many plugins as you want in the form and all will be downloaded and installed at the same time. One great feature is the ability to list all plugins (or active plugins) in your Wordpress installation. By doing this on existing installations, you can simply copy and paste the names into a new installation to get all of your favorite plugins downloaded and installed at one time.

WP-DBManager

When I first discovered this plugin I was amazed it was free. If you don’t already have it RACE to download and install it immediately. WP-DBManager essentially does what the name implies — it manages all aspects of your Wordpress MySQL database. The plugin allows you to optimize, repair and drop tables, backup the database to a directory and best of all, send you a backup copy on a scheduled basis. The backup can be compressed at your option.
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Bounce Rate - How Much Do Visitors Really Like Your Site?

Posted on 07. Apr, 2009 by ScotRobinson.

Sure you can use more visitors, but you’re seeing traffic steadily rising week after week. Or perhaps you’re paying for traffic using Google Adwords or some other form of advertising and you’re getting plenty of visitors to your site. Once visitors come to your site, do they like what they see? Are they sticking around to read your content, buy your products or participate in your discussion forums? Well the answers to many of these questions can be found in a little discussed statistic known as BOUNCE RATE.

Bounce Rate measures the percentage of time that a visitor comes to your site and doesn’t visit any further pages. In other words, they don’t like what they find on your site and do not even give you the courtesy of clicking one link. You can drive all of the visitors in the world to your site, but in most cases, if they leave right away, you are clearly doing something wrong. Different kinds of sites, have different “bounce characteristics” but in most cases, a high bounce rate is a bad thing. If your goal is to get people to click on Adsense ads, perhaps you are looking for a high bounce rate. Many blogs will have high bounce rates. Why? Visitors come to the blog to read the latest post which usually appears on the home page. Once a visitor reads the post they will leave, so you weren’t really expecting them to continue reading older posts. For most sites, however, we want to see a low bounce rate.
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