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What Happened to My Site Traffic?

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Long gone are the days when I would log into statistics interfaces every hour (and more) to see how many visitors my sites had and how much money I'd made by result.

And I'd be lying if I told you that I check them faithfully even once a week nowadays.

I didn't realize how complacent I'd become in that regard until a friend mentioned that her traffic had suddenly tanked from one day to the next and that she suspected it had something to do with it being an affiliate site.

After our chat, I decided to check Google Analytics and look at the statistics from my own affiliate sites.

I was stunned by what I saw on the Google Analytics homepage… one of the sites had a very large numeral circled in red with a descending arrow in front of it… -54.59%.

My heart dropped when I saw this graph on the Dashboard for that site.

Google Analytics shows huge traffic drop

ZERO visitors for over a week?

Now I could have rushed to some very bad assumptions about the immediate future – thinking that this traffic wipeout was going to be a big hurt in financial terms, or about all the work I'd have to do to bring it back to life, or worse, trying to negotiate with the folks at Google to re-instate the site and its rankings.

But the numbers just didn't make any sense.

I knew the site must have had some traffic because comments were being placed on the posts on a daily basis.

And although Analytics indicated the site's status as Receiving Data, it just didn't seem right.

What had I done? What changes had I made? And then it occurred to me that I'd upgraded the theme to StudioPress Genesis little over a week before.

Sure enough, when I checked the theme settings (and Genesis Hooks), I saw that I hadn't placed the Google Analytics code in the new header. (Google indicated that the status was OK, because it was reading the code from some old HTML pages that are still on the server.)

So, quick as a bunny installed the code and by the next day I saw that the traffic statistics were indicating normally.

Actually, they were better than before, because instead of ignoring the site, I published a couple of posts in the meantime and saw about a 25% spike in my average daily traffic.

Moral of the story?

Don't get all stressed out by what seems to be a catastrophic event… in most cases the problem has an easier solution than what you might expect. 🙂

6 Ways to Lower Your Bounce Rate

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Google Analytics SummaryHow many visitors come to your homepage only to leave just a few seconds later?

Five, fifty percent… ninety percent?

The percentage of visitors who leave your site from any given page is known as the bounce rate. Keeping track of bounce rate for your homepage is particularly important, especially if most people visit your site for the first time through that page.

You want those visitors to arrive at your homepage and find information that interests them on pages linked from the homepage. Ideally, they'll stay on your site until they've signed up for your newsletter and then leave the site purchase one of the products that you've recommended.

Here are some tips to help you lower the bounce rate on your homepage.

  1. Speed up your page load times. Slow loads are the main reason people don't stick around a site. If a homepage takes more than a few seconds to load completely, the site is losing potential revenue. Plugins are a common cause of slow page loads. Deactivate those plugins which aren't absolutely necessary. If it still loads slowly investigate ways to hardcode the plugin's functionality.
  2. Turn off related YouTube videos. After someone watches a YouTube video on your homepage, YouTube presents other relevant video options which all link off your site. Remember — keep links that don't generate revenue to an absolute minimum and NEVER place them on your homepage. If you want your visitors to see a video that you have posted on YouTube, uncheck the box that says “Include related videos”.
  3. Reduce the number of links on your homepage. Options are good. Too many options can be overwhelming. If you are using a blog theme like StudioPress that allows you to place recent posts under specific categories on your homepage, keep both the number of posts and categories to a minimum. Too, get rid of the ‘monthly archives' links in your sidebar as those lists of links get very long, very quickly.
  4. Get rid of the popups and page peels. When content on a site is compelling, a blogger doesn't need to annoy his or her visitors with endless in-your-face pop-ups to join their newsletter or ‘page peels' that display advertising in an irritating way.
  5. Limit or avoid advertising on your homepage. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, especially when you see all those popular blogs with 6 to 10 different banners in the header, sidebar and footers. The key phrase there is ‘popular'. A popular blog can afford a higher bounce rate through advertising. A new blog without much traffic needs to build rank and readership, and placing links out on the homepage is not the way to accomplish that goal. You want to warm your readers up to a product or service before sending them to the merchant's site.
  6. Place content strategically. Keep your most important content near the top of your homepage. For example, at the top-center of the homepage on my dating service review blog, I have a list of the Top 10 Things to Do on 101Date.com. Have such a list gives readers a quick scan of all the important areas of the site in a very small, obvious area. I found that adding that list lowered the homepage bounce rate on that site by about 20%.

Do you have any other ideas for lowering the bounce rate on your pages? Please share them with us by leaving a comment below.

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