Bounce rate and Top exit pages
I often get questions on how and for what certain terminology is used in Google Analytics. Some terms used tend to be confusing – not necessarily on their own, but when used in context with other reports. Examples are the bounce rate metric and top exit pages report, and more particularly how Google Analytics defines the two.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is a percentage value that represents the amount of visitors that exited the site from the same page they landed on (one-page visits). So when visitors enter your site and leave without navigating to another page, that’s quite literally a “bounce”. So how can this value be of significance to your reports?
Retailer websites, for example, will want to reduce the bounce rate, thereby improving the amount of visitors that stay on the site (increasing visitor retention) and hopefully improving conversions. Imagine the following scenario: You sell apples. A visitor searches for ‘apples’ on a search engine, clicks on your site in the SERPs but the first thing they see is an image of a pear. These people are likely to “bounce” and it’ll be up to you to figure out what makes (targeted) visitors not stick around on your site (images of pears, for obvious reasons). Bit of a silly example perhaps, but you’d be amazed with some of the mistakes made by online retailers.
Q&A: Google Analytics code in footer using Dreamweaver
Now and then I get some pretty interesting questions, sent to me through my contact form. I got one such question several times, and mostly from marketers who don’t really deal with the back-end of websites and aren’t quite sure how to get Google Analytics code up on their sites.
So the question I’m tackling today is: “How can I include Google Analytics code in the footer of my pages using Dreamweaver?”
Let’s start with some basic instructions on how to include Google Analytics code on your website’s pages. If you intend to update individual pages (not recommended for large sites), simply load Dreamweaver, load the page you’d like to place Google Analytics code on and in the top of your screen click on the Code view button to get into the page’s code.
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