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Are your analytics reflecting strong visitor numbers but poor conversion rates?
We often find businesses confused by what they are seeing on their analytics and disappointed that they are not converting. They’ll often tell us that while they have a great ‘time on page’ metric (usually over 5 minutes or so) and a low bounce rate, they are getting next to no enquires.
Why is that?
Upon closer inspection we often find that that a lot of their visits are either internal or come from unrelated domain searches on sites like www.domainname.com or www.godaddy.com.
Luckily, there are ways that you can exclude your own visits and unwanted IPs from your Google Analytics.
“It is quite annoying that our Google Analytics traffic statistics are adversely affected by our own visits or those of any member of our team (internal traffic).”
One likely reason that your enquiries don’t match your analytics could be internal traffic.
When you are reviewing and editing your site, and checking everything is functioning correctly, you are visiting each page a lot, which will artificially inflate the number of visits and page views per visit, bounce rate and average time spent per user.
We understand that it can be extremely frustrating, especially in the early days of a website, when these visits distort your analytics. Don’t worry, though, with a little know-how, you can exclude internal traffic from your analytics.
Despite it being a great idea to run a search for your business from time to time to see how you are appearing, we suggest that you make sure you are logged out of Google. Also, when accessing the site for admin purposes or company processes we recommend using a bookmarked link. Bookmarked links don’t affect Google’s measure of impressions to click through rate. If you are doing paid search, you should use the ad preview tool, rather than using the default search engine.
The next step we take is to exclude internal traffic. Members of your team will often sit with your company page open for long periods of time, for ease of access and to check everything is live and working okay. To exclude your internal company traffic (and home traffic), make sure to exclude your IPs from analytics.
Always ensure exclusions are applied to new profile rather than the default profile. To do so, follow the following steps:
Step 1: Which IPs should you exclude? Go to whatsmyip.org on the devices you want exclude. Make a note of each IP (if you are excluding home traffic, be aware that a lot of ISP’s do not assign static IP address).
Step 2: Once logged into analytics, click ‘Admin’ at the top, choose the account you want to apply for and click ‘Properties’.
Step 3: Click ‘Create New Profile’. Make sure that you choose a name for the new profile that will make it clear which profile this is.
Step 4: Click ‘Filters’ & ‘Add New Filter’. Select an IP exclusion template and add each IP that you have written down to that list.
Step 5: Save the profile and monitor the difference between the original profile and your new profile. You should see your stats become more accurate.
From now on, your Analytics should give a more honest reflection of how your website is performing. With real data, you’ll be able to make the changes you need to improve your conversion rate.
For more information on how to exclude your own visits and data from unwanted IPs from Google Analytics, read this great article by Daniel Lopéz Asaña, or get in touch and I’d be happy to walk you through it.
