Google Analytics is a free tool that tells you what’s happening with your website. However, it is confusing and if you’re like a lot of people, you look at how many people are visiting your site and not much else.
However, GA can tell you so much more. And with more information you can make changes to your site, add new products, get new people on your email list and over time, make more money.
Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of posts about how you can use Google Analytics. Hopefully these posts will be easy to understand and give you good reasons to look at the data I suggest.
Today we’ll be looking at a very simple piece of data: the Exit Pages Report. This is exactly what it sounds like – a report about what page people were on when they left your site.
If people are exiting from a “Thank You” page after making a purchase, that’s a good thing.
But if people are leaving your site without purchasing or getting on your email list, you have a problem. In many cases, you’ve lost them forever. All your hard work at getting them to come to your website is in vain.
That’s where the Exit Pages Report can come into play. You can find out which pages are causing people to leave your site.
You might also want to compare the exit report with the Landing Page Report. You want to find out if there are pages that are driving people away before they’ve had a chance to look at anything else on your site.
Once you’re armed with this information you can take action. Visit the most frequently exited pages and ask yourself:
- Does the information on the page match the title and meta description (what people see on a Google search)? If people aren’t finding what they expected they will move on.
- Is the content interesting and up-to-date? Maybe it was a great article three years ago but now it’s a little stale. Update it.
- Do you have an image on the page? We’re visual creatures and high-quality images can make us want to stick around.
- Do you have an appropriate call to action on the page? Or none at all? If you have a page with lots of visitors find a free report or video related to the topic of that page and get them on an email list.
- Is the exit page a product description? Maybe it needs to be rewritten to be more enticing.
Obviously you can’t do this with every page on your site – particularly if you have a blog that’s been around for a while. But if you take the pages that are doing the worst at keeping people engaged you can potentially make some real difference.
Andrea J. Stenberg
