We build affordable web sites and blogs that get results.

One of the many great views on your web site data that Google Analytics provides you with is information about your bounce rate sorted by search engine keyword. I was intrigued when I looked at this the other day, partly because of Dave Smith’s recent article on bounce rates, but also because it fit into my recent article about integrated blogs and web sites.

I’ve pasted some data from Google Analytics for my Sacramento real estate site here (with a few fields omitted for the sake of clarity).

Looking at the numbers, I was struck first of all by the good news that I had a really low comparative bounce rate exactly where I want it — for the key word “Sacramento Real Estate”. My bounce rate there is a meager 18.66%, meaning that more than 80% of the people who reach me for that keyword go further into my site. Moreover, I know from another site analysis tool I use that about 35% are clicking straight through to my basic search page (with still others clicking through to other search options). Perfect!

On the “negative” side, my highest bounce rate is for another phrase that brings a lot of people to my site, “things to do in Sacramento”. (When I first started the site I had a separate blog about Sacramento Things to Do as a “fluff piece”. I still get lots of traffic for it.) For that keyword, about 3/4 of the people who reach the site end up searching elsewhere, which is not surprising given that that’s not what my site is really about. This is not something that needs to be fixed, unless I start selling theater tickets instead of houses.

One statistic that was not surprising to me is the bounce rate for the phrase “Sacramento Real Estate Blog”, which is 66.7%. This that may come as a shock to other bloggers who are steeped in the conventional wisdom that buyers are blog readers looking for an expert. Two thirds of the people looking for the blog go no further into the site, while more than four fifths of the people who are looking for real estate do go further.

The Point of All This, And I Do Have One

Web site analytics tools like Google Analytics (by the way, did someone say FREE?) can provide you with valuable insights into what your visitors are actually doing when they reach your web site. What pages do they visit? Where do they go next? What keywords are getting you buyers? How many visitors are returning?

Often the results are not what you’d expect — and when they’re not, this can be the best information of all. For example, in the numbers at right, I noticed that my bounce rate for Sacramento Condos is 32.08%, but my bounce rate for Sacramento Foreclosures is 62.5%. Yet those pages are almost identical. Perhaps I need to go see how to improve the foreclosure page.

Or take the matter of the low conversion rate for the blog. Are there ways to improve that? Of course there are.

I feel a definite “follow-on article” feeling coming on.