3 Useful New Metrics That Will Change The Way You View Your Website

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Google’s constant war against irrelevant content has caused more than a few headaches over the years.
And as these changes have kicked in, the metrics you need to pay attention to to keep your site ranked or give your new site a chance of getting ranked constantly changes.

One upon a time you had to have meta tags all done nicely, another time it was making sure you weren’t keyword stuffing… the list goes on…

The latest news is scrolling… time on site and engagement. But this is great news for you ultimately.

Why?
Because it’s going to force you to concentrate on writing really good, engaging content and tweaking your site to encourage people to stay, read and comment on your stuff.

Remember the more time they spend on your site the more they are likely to join your list (providing you are offering them the opportunity to do so) and buy from you (again you must be making them an offer)

There’s an idea that a few select group of copywriters use which is this:
Every single line in the sales letter has one purpose and one purpose only… and that is to get the reader to read the next line…

With that in mind they will eventually make their way down the page and find their way to your offer.

With Google measuring scroll rate they are now effectively measuring this and using it as a gauge of how interesting your page is.

Regardless of whether you have a sales letter on that page or whether it’s just a blog with tons of content… the thinking is that if they scroll down then visitors want to explore all the content on offer on your page.

So with that in mind you can design the layout of your page to entice people to check out what you’ve got… all the way down your page.

HOT TIP: A simple way of increasing ‘scrolls’ is to ass a simple button on your landing page which has a down arrow.
Yes it’s crazy in a way because since the internet was a ‘thing’ people have been scrolling down… but adding a scroll down button has shown to achieve two things.
1. increase down scrolls by up to 40%
2. reduce ‘bounce’ (people leaving your site as soon as they land on it)
Like so many things if you’re using wordpress for your site, there’s a plugin for this. (there’s a few actually – just do a search)

Since your site’s ‘Bounce rate’ is one of the main factors used in determining user experience and relevancy you need to do anything you can do minimize ‘bounce’

But that’s not the point of this article.

How do you measure scroll, time on site and activity on different parts of your site.
If you are blogging there will be areas which have a high capital value for you and other areas which are not.
For example an area where you have paid ads, or an area where you make an offer to get people onto your list or to check out your product.
There are also areas which are just content, or have links to your legal pages.

You want to attract attention to some areas and not to other areas. Make sense?

So here are 3 tools which are plugins for Google analytics. They will allow Google to add extra features to your analytics control panel.

Here they are:

Scroll Depth – tracks not only how many visitors are scrolling but how far on each page.

Riveted: Tracks time on site much more accurately than the standard Google Analytics measurement which can be misleading.

Screen time: tracks not only how much time people are spending on your site but how much time they are spending on the areas (you define) which are the income producing ares of your content.