Hi everyone,
I thought this meeting went well, and hope you do, too.
Marcia's demonstration of how to cull keywords was great. She created this list by segmenting KEYWORDS with BOUNCE RATE. In other words, she listed all the KEYWORDS on her site, and sorted them by their BOUNCE RATE. This kind of list gives you insight into what your patrons are looking for. Say for example that the most frequently used keywords are "1920s newspapers." You might then want to add an eye catcher on the home page saying "See our Newspaper Collection, 1880-1940." Likewise, if you have a collection you think is important, but no one seems to be looking for it, then you can ask yourselves-should we promote this collection, or, should we spend less time on this because
no body's interested in it? Or you might ask yourselves if this collection doesn't really fit with your mission, and perhaps should be moved to another organization. In business you have to justify the expense of maintaining the website.
This is also true for you too, since your resources are also scarce, but it is much more difficult to put a number to the worth of visits to your collection. The data won't give you answers, but it will help you formulate informed questions.
I thought this was a great example of 1) combining information (using number of visits, avg. time on page time, and bounce rate) 2) segmenting (separating keywords using the bounce rate to exclude the un-successful keywords) 3) drilling down- we did this when looking at the keywords for specific pages 4) comparing data over time- using the comparison tool that GA provides with the calendar.
Another way to put together this data is to download it in a CSV form, and then manipulate the data with Excel.
One specific thing you can do with KEYWORDS is to add them to your metadata which describes the content of your site. If you see other WCHC members keywords, and you do not have them on your site, go ahead and include them in yours. In other words, share ideas that work!
Some important terms we discussed were:
exit rate- the page from which people leave. They could have been on the site for 3 minutes, but there's one page only from which they exit.
bounce rate- when someone enters anywhere on the site, and leaves without clicking anything.
traffic sources
search engines: work by looking for keywords. If you have good content, and use appropriate terms to describe it, search engines should find you. Analyizing your keywords may show you that there are other terms people use for the same thing--so you may want to consider including those in your writing, and in your metadata.
direct- user has the page bookmarked, or type in URL. They're considered very loyal. Doug has tons of them.
referrals- these are other pages that have a link to anyplace in your website. Agnes has a large proportion of these. Again, if you see another WCHC participant with a referral from say, mich.gov, you may want to look up that page. If it's appropriate to add your site, go ahead and write the webmaster and ask to be added.
One point for discussion--it seems that the consortium would get a lot of benefit from having one simple web page with links to all consortium members. That way, instead of each separate organization writing to each referring agency, mich.gov, for example, you could have ONE PERSON write to a list of referring sites, asking for ONE LINK to WCHC.ORG (or whatever).
This would save a lot of work for all of you. Say this mich.gov site has a link to wchc.org--when someone clicks that, they will become aware of not just the place they were looking for (say Saline), but all 30 sites. Just wanted to point out the possibility...
Happy Holidays!
Rachel
