David Pitlyuk

Earlier on yesterday I was looking at some stats for my sites through Google Analytics. I never really paid attention to the bounce rate, but later on that day I saw a new post from Scot at Self Made Minds discussing bounce rates on his own pages. I decided to look a little further into it. Here’s Google’s explanation for bounce rate:

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.

Basically a person comes to your site, and leaves without looking at any other pages, it’s considered a bounce. Obviously the lower bounce rate percentage you have, the better it normally is for your site. It would mean that the user found something they liked and looked further into the site for more. This is an interesting statistic to look at, because you can use these numbers to better optimize your site, for example by making the user interface easier to use.

So one of the main things I noticed in Google Analytics when look at stats for my eCommerce site ActiveTuning was that there was a drastic change in January. I noticed that pageviews, pages per visit, and bounce rate had all drastically improved. So what changed in January? I had actually redesigned the entire site, and according to the stats, it made one hell of a difference! A comparison between March 2007 and December 2006 shows these improvements:

Pageviews: Up 117%
Pages Per Visit: Up 92.58%
Bounce Rate: Down 68% (To 14.46%)

Those are some ridiculously drastic differences in numbers, and sales increases have shown for it. I built the new design for the site as optimally as I could from a users perspective, and more people are now using the site the way it should be used.

As Scot mentioned, here’s the breakdown of what percentage of bounce rate is considered good and bad:

Under 20%: Extremely hard to achieve and very good.
21%-35%: A good score and probably the one most should aim for
36%-50%: Cause for concern and investigation needed to see if it can be improved
Greater than 50%: Very worrying unless there is good reason.

Another important factor he mentions are some scenarios where the bounce rate is actually expected to be high:

• Shoppers browsing for prices to compare
• Mini Site
• Info sites with good Adsense CTR placement
• Ad campaign concentrating on one sales page
• Site does not meet visitors expectation
• Slow loading site
• Poor navigation
• Blogs where visitors read a single post and visit often without having to navigate

Looking at this list, you’ll see that blogs is listed as a line item. For us blogs, we can expect our bounce rates to be higher than normal just because of the nature of the beast. It should definitely be a goal to lower the rates as much as possible, but the way blogs work, it would be impossible to have such low rates as ActiveTuning for example.

I think it’d be a good time to see where my sites stand and how they compare in regards to bounce rates. First we’ll look at this blog since it’s inception. The average bounce rate is 83.61%, but it has been getting lower (June so far is 71.87%):

ActiveTuning averages much lower, and normally is somewhere between 12-20%. Here’s a look at the bounce rates for ActiveTuning since March 1st:

Remember I mentioned that just by improving the design and UI for ActiveTuning, it made a drastic difference in bounce rates? Take a look at this chart comparing December 2006 and February 2007 bounce rates:

The rate dropped down from 55-70%, all the way down to the teens. Talk about an improvement!

What is your bounce rate like for your site? Do you have any sites that are lower than ActiveTuning? Scot asked the same question, and it’s worth taking a look at some of the comments that were posted on his site.

I got an e-mail this morning that I had a new message on my MyBlogLog (feel free to add me as a contact and/or join my community) from a guy that happened to come to my blog via StumbleUpon. He was asking me to test drive his new free advertising co-op called AdGridWork. It’s essentially a free ad network which works through contextual link exchanges.

You sign up, make an ad, and place the ad code on your site. As you generate impressions and clicks, the ad you create advertising your own site will get displayed on other network members pages. You get free advertising for your site (at the cost of giving up some ad space on your own). This may be especially good for newer and low-mid trafficked blogs where it’s not worth much money to give up space where a paid advertisement can go.

The concept seems good to me, I’m really just surprised the AdGridWork isn’t somehow monetizing it. I would have thought they would do something like a certain percentage of ads would be theirs and paid to them…or at the very least ads promoting other websites which they own.

Does it work though? The good part about answering this question is that it’s absolutely free to try out and see for yourself. If you do decide to sign-up, let me know how it has been working out for you. Either by posting a comment or writing a review (and then let me know and I’ll link to you).

I’m going to do a compilation of reviews that I find here which I’ll keep updated:

• Success Online
• KCLau’s Money Tips

Another interesting service that the same guys provide is called ReviewBack. It’s simply a marketplace to find other similar blogs out there that you can review for free, and they will review you back for free. A nice, free, easy way to build some traffic.

I’m sure you’ve heard the statistic that nine out of every ten businesses fail. For those of you in the beginning stages of a business, or even thinking about starting one…that’s a pretty harsh number that can scare some away from investing their time and money. Based on this number, 90% of all business attempts fail!

Now enter the teller of good news! That statistic is highly exaggerated! In reality 65% of new businesses are still operating after four years according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Tracking Series. On top of this, about a third of the statistics that show a business to be a failure may actually be a success. How so? Those business may have closed because the owner sold a portion of the business or may have sold the entire thing for another opportunity.

Debunking this myth is great news for those looking to get into business. Your chances of success went from 10% to 65+%! So don’t just think about it…do it!

[Source: Business.com]

Wordpress just released version 2.2.1, which fixes some bugs, as well as some security holes.  Here’s a list of fixed bugs:

• Atom feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for IE7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

A list of security holes fixed are as follows:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Due to the security fixes, it’s highly recommended to upgrade to the latest version.  It can be downloaded here.

I’ve been specifically watching the number of unique visitors from search engines that my blog is getting over time. You would think that as more content is generated, more traffic from search engines would also be generated, right? So lets take a look at the number of unique visitors from search engines I’ve received since the inception of my blog:

Based on the chart, we can see that the number of visitors have definitely gone up since the beginning, and the trendline proves that. The problem lies in the numbers from about mid-late April through today:

We can see here that pulling this range of dates significantly changes the perception of search growth. The trendline over the last 1.5-2 months has pretty much flatlined, even though my content has doubled. I’m pretty much stuck in the 30 or so uniques per day range over this time…and I’m very curious as to why that may be?

Which Search Engines?

The only search engine pretty any sort of significant traffic has been Google. I would say that at this point, the other engines are not bringing in enough traffic to constitute even being worried about those numbers.

What Can I Do?

I’m looking to you guys for some help on this one. Do you have any recommendations as to why I may have gotten this halt in growth from search engines? Why would it not continue to grow as content grew? I can provide any other data needed, but I’d like to figure this one out. I think it would also be interesting to see what solutions we can figure out, and how it affects the bottom-line over the near future. Post your comments below or contact me directly with any ideas or feedback you may have. If your advice is good and may help out, I’ll make sure to provide some recognition to your site or blog.

I got an e-mail from Scot Smith of Meridiancrest.com yesterday letting me know that he was back to blogging and had redesigned his site. His new design is one of the better ones out there in my opinion, so major props to him on that.

When checking the new look at, I noticed something on his sidebar which I hadn’t seen on other sites before. He has a section called “Recent Reaction”, which are essentially back-links to other sites and blogs which have written and linked to his site a specific post on his site. He also has a small blurb underneath stating this:

“Good Idea: Get a free back-link automatically by leaving a comment or simply mentioning one of my posts on your blog.“

This simple concept allows him to promote others to write about his site, as their article will receive a link on all of his pages. This is an excellent way to build more linkbacks, more traffic, and increase your sites SEO stance.

Adding this feature is as simple as adding the get recent comments plugin, which also suppors the back-link feature. If you have this installed already, or you do install it, let me know how it has worked out for you. Have you seen more people linking back to your site? Or did it not make any difference?

Google Analytics is an awesome program to track traffic on your websites, but there was always one thing that bothered me. In the referring sites section, there was no link to actually visit the site that referred you. You had to copy the domain name, then copy the actual full URL, add the domain name to it…every time you wanted to see the page that referred you.

But finally, Google has come through with a simple solution:

Google added a new window icon that actually clicks through to either the domain or the actual page that referred you.

THANK YOU GOOGLE!

Update: I found out that a bunch of new features on top of clickable referral URLs were also added to Google Analytics:

Hourly Reporting
View by  daily/hourly is now back for those that want to see their stats broken down  by the hour rather than just the day.

Cross Segmentation by Network Location
You can now cross segment reports by network location.

Increased number of data rows per page
A single report page now can show 500 rows of data, rather than just 100.

Bounce Rate increase/decrease
A slight error in colors of bounce rate increase/decrease was corrected.

AdWords Integration
It’s now easier to link your AdWords and Analytics account together.

I’m glad to see proactive changes being made to the software.

Like most of you, I am a stats whore when it comes to my websites. I can spend hours constantly checking various stats, income, referrals, etc, etc. So when you can get better stats, it’s exciting! I found a really good article yesterday on using some advanced features in Google Analytics.

Patrick discusses a few different features, I’m going to cover just a couple of them that I think you guys would be most interested in. Patrick touches these topics:

• Tracking exit clicks, banner clicks and RSS feed subscribers
• How do I track downloads?
• Tracking ecommerce revenue
• How to track Sales
• Tracking 404 errors

I want to cover tracking clicks/RSS feed subscribers, as well as ecommerce stats. If you’re interested in anything else, check out the article

Tracking Clicks And RSS Feed Subscribers

Tracking clicks was a feature I found out about and used when I was developing SmashMyViper.com (now sold). The site had a grid of advertisements (We ended up having 32 different ads on one page), but we wanted to track the number of clicks each one was getting. The ads could not be ad served as we did not want to bog down the server with requests each time, so I utilized Google Analytics to help me out. By adding a simple line of code to each URL I was able to track clicks. For example a regular URL would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.activetuning.com”>ActiveTuning</a>

To utilize click tracking, you would just add a little code:

<a href=”http://www.activetuning.com” onClick=”javascript:urchinTracker (’/outgoing/activetuning’);“>

On SmashMyViper.com, I gave each ad an ID, so my tracking code was something like this:

<a href=”http://www.activetuning.com” onClick=”javascript:urchinTracker (’ID22′);“>

Now when I login to Google Analytics, I go to the content category and choose content drilldown. I can see ID22 as one of the line items, and the number of pageviews is the number of clicks it receives:

When you click “/ID22″, you can then see a history of the number of clicks over time the link has received.

I would recommend always adding a “/outgoing” to the link (ex: onClick=”javascript:urchinTracker (’/outgoing/activetuning’);) because it will better organize everything in Google Analytics.

By using this methodology, you can create a tracking click on your RSS feed button to see how many are clicking on it. Put it in different places, change the icon, and make various changes to test where it is most effective.

Doing eCommerce Analysis With Google Analytics

If you run an eCommerce page, setting it up to track everything with Google Analytics is a must. There is so much valuable information that can be gotten for example:

• Revenue analysis
• Conversion rates
• Referrals
• Visits to purchase
• Time to purchase
• Much much much more

I would post a ton of screenshots for some of the information that it gives me for ActiveTuning, but I have to keep that confidential due to my competitors reading my blog.

In order to track sales, some server side script needs to be added on the order confirmation page that populates a form in this format:

<body onLoad=”javascript:__utmSetTrans()”> <form style=”display:none;” name=”utmform”> <textarea id=”utmtrans”>UTM:T|[order-id]|[affiliation]| [total]|[tax]| [shipping]|[city]|[state]|[country] UTM:I|[order-id]|[sku/code]|[productname]|[category]|[price]| [quantity] </textarea> </form>

I personally used an open source contribution that was built for osCommerce and automates this function, so I can’t really say much about doing it yourself. Google does offer some references and guides here.

If you have any other tips, please share!

John Wesley gives his 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers. This is a good way to see what has and hasn’t worked for him, and use that for yourself.

The guys at YoungGoGetter write about How to work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue. I found this useful because if I wanted to make template changes, I don’t want the world to see…especially because of lots of mistakes are made. Using a preview theme allows only you to see changes until you want to make them live.

Smashing Magazine writes two excellent resources on the Golden Rules of Linkbaiting and Google PageRank.

Martin speaks his mind on giving back to the online community. Not only will his methods help others, but it will also help your own blog. I’m a big a proponent to this, especially in the blogosphere, where I do feel like it’s a big community and not an anonymous website.

Muhammed guest blogs on Copyblogger about Writing Headlines for Regular Readers, Search Engines, and Social Media. Find out everything you need to know to appropriately choose headlines to market for the type of readers you want.

Credit card interest rates vary greatly by credit cards. The best business credit cards are low interest credit cards which will keep your company's bills lowers. Be careful when choosing a credit card to find one that best suits your needs.

As I continue to work on the redesign of my blog, I’ve been thinking more and more about a title. My current title is “The ramblings of David Pitlyuk, entrepreneur”. I recently made a post about what my niche for this blog is, and I try to write topics that will interest entrepreneurs. I can also safely say that many of the topics would interest young entrepreneurs more specifically…but not necessarily. So I wanted to make it “Topics of Interest for Entrepreneurs”, but I feel like I’m limiting myself too much. I would still like to post things on a more personal level, things that may not necessarily fall into that category/niche. Do you think that is still ok? That is why I like to use the word “ramblings” in the current title, but at the same time, I don’t want to tie my name into it as I do plan on eventually having a couple of guest bloggers.

Do you have any recommendations knowing this information and the content that I do write about?

What Are Others Using?

It’s interesting to take a look at what some other bloggers use:

ShoeMoney - Skills To Pay The Bills
HarpzOn - Practical Advice to Succeed Online
John Chow - Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com
ProBlogger - Make Money Online with ProBlogger Blog Tips
CommunitySpark - Online Community Building
NevBlog - Neville’s Financial Blog
Entrepreneur Daily - Entrepreneur Business Blog
YoungGoGetter - The business playground for entrepreneurs young at heart
Brandon Hopkins - Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins
CopyBlogger - Copywriting tips for online marketing success from Copyblogger
LifeHack - Productivity, Getting Things Done and Lifehacks Blog
Personified - Best Damn Blog on the Planet
SeoMoz Blog - Search Engine Marketing  News & Tips
TimeForBlogging - Blogging, Website Tips, eCommerce, Forum and Entrepreneurship

I think just sticking with “Topics of Interest for Entrepreneurs” is my best bet for now.  Maybe even something like “Topics of Interest for Entrepreneurs and other ramblings of David Pitlyuk” would be more accurate, but I think it’s also much too long.  I would love to hear your opinions.