Why aren’t visitors staying long enough on your website?

What is the bounce rate metric in Google Analytics?

Your bounce rate shows how many visitors came into the page and exited without any other interaction.

There are a few contributors for high bounce rate and include:

• Un-Interesting content
• Misalignment between what the visitor was looking for and the content.
• Poor design
• Too many ads
• No clear call to action

Most of the above reasons are related to content, but there is another very reason that may be driving visitors out – page performance.

“I noticed that my website loaded about 4 seconds. After I did an optimization, the bounce rate dropped significantly.”

Let’s look at things from the visitor’s perspective.

When you search for something on the internet, you want fast results and snappy websites – Anything else, and you’ll be out of there in just a couple of seconds.

How to measure the load time of a page

Performance is something I can go on for hours, and get very technical, but right now, I want to give you a quick and easy way to see how your page is performing, and then suggest a few things you can do to speed it up.

Chrome Developer Tools

All modern browsers include a handy built-in tool for web developers that allows them to look under the hood of the website. However, even if you are not a developer, and looking at code is something that you try and keep a distance from, there are a few features that you may find useful.

I’m going to use Chrome in my example, because, in my opinion, their developer tools are easy to work with. For me at least.

One of the things that you can see is how much a page takes to load in the browser, and this is what we are going to do now.

You can open up the developer tools by clicking the top menu, then Developer, and then choose Developer Tools.

Then go to the network tab and reload the page. Make sure that the “Disable Cache” box is checked.

There are a few useful statistics that you may want to look at –

1. Loaded – When the page has finished loading
2. DOMContentLoaded – When the base of the page has completed loading
3. Finish – When all the scripts stopped running
4. MB Transferred – How much did the browser download
5. Requests – How many individual requests the browser made from start to finish.

You can find all of the stats at the bottom bar of the Network tab.

The two main stats that you should focus on are the DOMContentLoaded and Loaded.

DOMContentLoaded

In most cases, it is enough to display the base content for a visitor to stay on a page. Even if some images are missing, the text is already showing, and it gives your visitor a reason to stay.

DOMContentLoaded shows you how long it took.

Loaded

On websites where images, videos, and dynamic data are a major part of a page, the Loaded field matters most, as it shows how long it took to load up everything.

How to speed up your WordPress pages

Here are a few steps you can take to make sure your pages are loading faster:

1. Install a caching plugin – These plugins create a static copy of your pages that loads much faster. Some of the more popular plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, WP Super Cache.
2. Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) in front of your website – The idea is to use a third-party system that keeps a copy of your pages, in static form (which is faster), closer to your users. Think of a visitor from another country that downloads the page from a computer closer to him. Today, most web hosting providers have that option. You can check out WPEngine or CloudFlare.
3. Reduce the size of the images on your website – If you don’t want to do it manually, there are plugins like WPSmush that can do that for you.
4. Use an optimization plugin – Reduce the size (minify) and the number of scripts, and CSS files on your website – Autoptimize, WP Rocket

$$REFERRER$$

The first placeholder will add the referrer URL, meaning the previous page or website the user was on before landing on the page.

It could be useful to map out top performing inbound links to your landing page and see which sources resulted in users performing an action like subscribe to your newsletter.
In the above example, you can click track the submit button and use the referrer in the category, action or label fields of the event.

Note that if the visitor opened the page directly, the referrer will default to the current page name.

$$ATTR_ Custom HTML Attributes

The second placeholder that we added can be customized to use any HTML attribute the click or scroll event element has.
A couple possible examples:
$$ATTR_SRC$$” – Can be used to include an image src (source).
$$ATTR_DATA-ACTION$$ – Will include the data-action attribute

Learn more about this feature

If so, I’m here to open your eyes to a whole new level of Google Analytics tracking. It’s called Event Tracking and it can help you track everything from which outbound links your visitors click to how often your visitors actually interact with your content.

Keep reading to learn all about Google Analytics Event Tracking and how you can get it for your own website.

What Is Google Analytics Event Tracking? How Does it Help?

Event Tracking is a feature that’s baked into Google Analytics but requires additional setup to use beyond merely adding the regular Google Analytics tracking code to your site. For that reason, many webmasters who aren’t heavily into analytics often eschew using Event Tracking because of its perceived complexity.

And that’s a shame because Event Tracking is an incredibly valuable analytics tool.

Basically, Event Tracking allows you to track specific events that you define. That’s vague…so let’s look at a few examples of events that you can track with Event Tracking.

With the right code implementation, you can track:

• When and where a visitor clicks an outbound link
• Whether or not visitors actually play the videos you embed in your content
• Whether or not visitors scroll down to a certain part of your part
• If there are certain fields in your forms which cause users to stop filling out your form

That’s by no means a complete list, but it highlights the power of taking the time to properly set up Event Tracking.

How Does Event Tracking Actually Help Your Site?

Ok, so you can collect tons of additional data with Google Analytics Event Tracking. But how does that actually translate into tangible improvements to your site? I mean, if it’s not putting more money in your pocket or improving your user experience, what’s the point?

Let’s look at a few examples of how you can actually put this data to use to improve your site, starting with this biggie:

Finding out which traffic sources convert the best.

When you combine Google Analytics Events with Google Analytics Goals, you can track conversion rates for any metric you can think of. For example, you could set up goals for:

• Clicks to affiliate links
• Newsletter signups
• Ebook downloads
• Account creations
• Leads
• And lots, lots more.

Then, you can find out which traffic sources or pages on your site contribute most to achieving those goals…and which need improvement.

Don’t you think it would be pretty valuable to be able to know something like “Visitors from Facebook click on outbound affiliate links 35% more often than visitors from Google”?

If you had those insights, you would know that it makes sense to focus more of your effort on Facebook traffic.

Or what if you found out that:

• Visitors from Twitter don’t actually engage with your content by scrolling down
• Your readers rarely watch the videos you embed (so your videos are basically wasting space)

Get the idea? Tracking events, when combined with the rest of Google Analytics, gives you actionable data that you can use to improve your website and focus your effort on actions or traffic sources that get you the biggest bang for your buck.

Where Can You View Event Tracking Reports?

Once you have Event Tracking set up (more on that in a second), you can view the main Event dashboard by going to Behavior → Events:

From there, you can drill down further and view Events divided up by pages or other reports:

You’ll also be able to add Events as Secondary dimensions in any of your other Google Analytics reports:

And one great use for Events is the aforementioned method of setting them up as Goals so that you can track conversion rates for your various Events. You can do that by going to Admin → Goals → New Goal:

Of course, to view all of those helpful reports, you’ll need to actually configure Google Events first. So let’s jump into that next…

How Can You Set Up Google Analytics Event Tracking?

Event Tracking functions by adding some code that sends Google Analytics four key pieces of information (plus a few more optional additions):

• Category (required)
• Action (required)
• Label (optional)
• Value (optional)

I’ll dig into what each of those means in a second. But first I want to show you how this full code snippet actually works for tracking something simple like an outbound link click.

If you know the basics of HTML, you’re probably familiar the structure of a normal link. If you’re not, it looks something like this:

<a href=”www.externalsite.com”>Link to External Site</a>

Well, to add a Google Analytics Event to that link, all you need to do is add this snippet:

<a href=”www.externalsite.com” onclick="ga('send', 'event', 'CATEGORY', 'ACTION', 'LABEL');">Link to External Site</a>

If you just need to add Event Tracking to a single link, it really is that simple. The complexity comes when you want to:

• Track more advanced Events like scroll depth or video interactions
• Track multiple links of the same class. For example, track every “Buy Now” button on your site.
• Insert dynamic data into the Event Tracking. For example, make the Label equal to the title of the page where the event occurred.

The complexity of those advanced methods is one of the reasons we created our WordPress plugin to help implement Event Tracking.

What Do the Different Labels Mean for Event Tracking?

Ok, so how about those different labels that you have to add to your Event? What do they mean?

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Category – required – the object that was interacted with. For example, if you’re tracking video interactions, you’d make it something like “Video”.
• Action – required – the type of interaction. For example, for a video, it might be “play”, but for an outbound link click, it might be “click”.
• Label – optional – Lets you add more specific categorization to your events. For example, it might be a specific campaign or post.
• Value – optional – If you want, you can assign a numeric value to an event.

What’s the Difference Between Interaction and Non-Interaction Events?

There’s one more wrinkle that I didn’t show you. For every Event that you track, you can specify it as either an:

• Interaction Event
• Non-Interaction Event

So what’s the difference? The effect on your site’s bounce rate measurement.

When a visitor completes an Event labeled as “Interaction”, they’re no longer considered a bounce…even if they leave without visiting a second page.

On the other hand, Non-interaction Events can still be considered bounces as long as a visitor meets the other criteria of a bounce.

Depending on the specific Event, you may or may not want to label it as interaction or non-interaction.

How Can You Get Started With Google Analytics Event Tracking and WordPress?

If you’re using WordPress as the CMS for your website, our WP Google Analytics Events plugin helps you set up Google Analytics Event Tracking on WordPress without needing to know a single line of code.

Even if you’ve never created a Google Analytics Event in your life, you can quickly get up and running with everything from outbound link tracking to tracking YouTube interactions.

If you’re not quite sure you want to get a dedicated plugin, you can also play around with Event Tracking by using the simple outbound link tracking example I gave you above. In fact, if you just want to track a single link, that’s really all you need.

No matter which method you choose, I hope I’ve opened your eyes to the power of Event Tracking. Now, get out there and track your first Event!

UI Changes

The first change that you may see is that other than the General Settings page, there is no save button.
Each event now has a save, remove or add button next to it. The new UI will allow you to add events faster without refreshing every time. It also solves another problem that some of our users had when they were not able to add more than 160 click events.

Google Tag Manager Support

Here is something that we were working on for a while, and it is finally out. Web sites that use the Google Tag Manager were not able to use the plugin, but now you can.
Setting up the plugin to work with the Google Tag Manager is requires a little more than just checking the box in the General Settings tab.
Here is a video guide that will walk you through the process.

What else?

1. We added a What’s new tab
2. Better license status UI
3. Minor bug fixes

Ever wished that you could track outbound link clicks on WordPress and have the data show up right in your Google Analytics dashboard? Google Analytics makes it so simple to find out how people click around your own site. But when it comes time for them to head somewhere else, Google Analytics leaves you high and dry with respect to click analytics!

And here’s the thing:

Those outbound clicks? They’re usually the most important to track. They let you collect helpful data like when, where, and how often your visitors click on:

• Affiliate links
• Ads
• And any other outbound links you’re interested in tracking

But as valuable as those insights are, many people find it complicated to try to dig into Google Events or Google Tag Manager, especially for people who aren’t very familiar with code.

So, in this quick tutorial, I’m going to show you how to track outbound links in WordPress without needing to know a single line of code. You’ll still be able to use your normal Google Analytics dashboard – you’ll just use a plugin to handle adding all that complex Event tracking code to your site.

How to Track Outbound Links in WordPress With a Plugin

To track outbound links, you’ll need WP Google Analytics Events Pro. Once you’ve got it installed and activated, you only need to complete a few steps to get outbound link tracking up and running on your WordPress site.

How to Track ALL Outbound Links on WordPress

If you want to track every single outbound link on your WordPress site, it’s ridiculously simple. All you need to do is head to WP GA Events Pro → General Settings and check the Enable box next to Track Links. Make sure to also change the dropdown to External.

And you should also set Link click delay to at least ~150 ms to ensure all clicks get tracked:

That’s literally all you need to do to track all of your outbound links. If you go to Google Analytics, you’ll see clicks register on the page they came from, and WP Google Analytics Events Pro will automatically add the URL of the clicked link as the Event Label:

Easy enough, right? But what if you want to get more specific with your tracking?

How to Track Outbound Links of a Specific Class on WordPress

This feature is really nifty. Let’s say you have a button that leads people to an external affiliate offer. If you want to pay special attention to tracking just this button, you can have WP Google Analytics Events Pro either:

• Only track outbound clicks for those buttons
• Track all outbound link clicks, but use different labels for those buttons

For this example, let’s say that your button looks something like <a href=”link.com” class=”buybutton”>Link</a>. You can set up tracking for just those buttons with the class “buybutton” with just a couple of mouse clicks.

All you need to do is hop over to the Click Tracking tab. Then, enter your CSS element name and choose whether it’s an ID or a Class:

After that, you just need to insert labels for the various event labels. You can also use placeholders to automatically pull information from the actual page a user is on.

To grasp how this applies to Google Analytics, let’s look at a quick example. If you configure your class-specific outbound click tracking like this:

It will show up on Google Analytics like this:

And when you drill down into the Event Category, you’ll see that the Event Label is the page where the “buybutton” link was clicked:

You can track as many different CSS classes or IDs as needed, which lets you collect important information about all the different types of outbound links on your site.

Wrapping Things Up

Learning to track outbound clicks on WordPress with Google Analytics opens up a whole new world of optimization for your site.

You can figure out where people are clicking outbound links and where those outbound links are taking your visitors. And then, you can use that information to fine-tune all of your business practices.

All it takes is a few clicks to get up and running!

Advanced Mode is the newest feature of our plugin, WP Google Analytics Events Pro, is out today, and I am very happy to share it with you.

When we created the WP Google Analytics Events Pro plugin, our goal was to make is as accessible and as simple to use, especially for non-programmers – but there was a tradeoff. To make it easy to use and to prevent potential issues on live websites, we had to give up on flexibility that could potentially allow you to track a whole lot more.

The new advanced mode opens up the option to use jQuery selectors for click and scroll tracking. With a little understanding of how jQuery works, you will be able to track elements that don’t inherently have classes or ids.

A word of warning. Using this feature could potentially cause javascript related issues if misconfigured. If you are not sure of how to use it, our support team will be happy to answer any question. We also advise you to backup your website, but that is just best practice. 

Here are just a few examples of what you can achieve with the advanced mode:

1. Track all the PDF downloads on your site by using the [href$=”.pdf”] selector.
2. It’s now easier to track form’s submit button using the :submit selector.
3. Track elements without a unique identifier using Parent-Descendant selectors.

For more information about this feature –
https://wpflow.com/knowledgebase/advanced-mode/

Getting the update

The new version is available now on your WordPress admin panel under the plugins section.

New here?

Here is a short demo of our plugin:

Ninja Forms is one of the popular form integration plugins for WordPress. It has many extensions and at the time of writing this article, has more than 500,000 active installs.

The WP Google Analytics Events plugin gives you an easy way to track Ninja Form submissions with Google Analytics.
I wanted to give you a short step by step walkthrough for tracking your first form submission.

The Ninja Form

We installed the very popular Ninja Form plugin and set up a page with the default contact form.

Our goal is to tell Google Analytics whenever someone clicks on the Send button. We can use it to set goals and understand how this form performs.
Ninja Forms has a neat feature that allows you to assign a class to the submit button and we are going to need it in a minute.
We assigned the send button with the class “contact-form-submit”.

If we take a closer look at the Send button with using the Chrome developer tools, you can see that the button has the “contact-form-submit” class assigned.

Using the WP Google Analytics Events plugin

Google allows you to set up custom tracking with a feature called “events”. With events, you can programmatically track custom metrics that are relevant to your site. You can create events for button clicks, media interaction and a lot more, but in our case, we want to focus on the contact form submission.

To install the plugin, go to the Plugin’s page in the WordPress admin panel and search for WP Google Analytics Events. If you want to use some of the Pro features, you can head directly to Upgrade to WP Google Analytics Events Pro.

Once you have the plugin installed, go to the plugin’s general settings page, and fill in your Google Analytics identifier.

Setting up click tracking

To set up the event that will fire up every time the contact form will be submitted, head over to the Click Tracking tab.
This is where we configure, well, click events.

For the identifier, put in the name of the class that we assigned the button – “contact-form-submit”. Select class as the type, and then fill in the event details as they will show up in google analytics.

In this example, we set the event category to Contact Form, the action to  Click and the label to Contact Form Submit.

That’s it. The next time that someone submits the contact form, you should see an event in Google Analytics.

If you want to learn more about how to use the plugin, just go to the Getting Started Guide tab on the plugin’s admin panel, and register for a three-day mini course.

Page speed is one of the most important factors in SEO and user experience. Using this guideline, one of our clients decided to focus on this metric and work on improving the site’s speed to see if it increases conversions and customer retention. As you will soon see, the first task was to create a dashboard to help us monitor website performance.

46 years ago, Miller wrote:

The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:

1. 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
2. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
3. 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback Pduring the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times–3-important-limits/

When I’m about to work on performance improvements, the first question I usually ask is what is the current behavior and how can I measure changes.

We started debating on which tool would be best to monitor the performance. That’s when one of the developers asked, Why not use Google Analytics? It’s already collecting the data and allows us to set alerts and even make a correlation between performance and conversions.

Monitor Website Performance Using Google Analytics

The first place to look at is the Site Speed Overview dashboard. It is located under “Behavior”-> “Site Speed”.

The dashboard shows you site speed statistics of your entire website.

Here are some interesting stats to look at:
* Avg. Page Load Time – This is the main thing to look for. It sums up the user experience and includes the loading of the page, rendering and script execution.
* Avg. Server Response Time – Shows you response time from the servers. It includes the network layer and the backed execution time.
* Avg. Page Download Time – The time it took for downloading the content. Later on, when we examine performance tuning, this is what minification improves.

Looking at the dashboard, you may see some peaks in performance and detailed information about each browser, but to paint a better picture, it is useful to make a comparison with the previous period. You can do that by clicking the time frame and select compare to the previous period.

Now you can see some reference to how you are doing. Did performance improve or decline from the previous period?
Note that google uses the green color to indicate improvement and red for a deterioration. It can be a bit confusing because the arrows and color show the opposite of the numbers. Trust your instincts on this one.

Creating the performance dashboard

At this point, you can create a new performance dashboard or use an existing one and add the current chart –
Click the add to dashboard button, select new dashboard, name it, and check the Timeline and Table options.
You will be taken to the new dashboard screen where you customize the layout and the widgets.

Viewing the page speed of specific pages

We can now drill down a bit and see how specific pages perform.
Let’s say that the best converting page on our website is the “competition” page.
Any performance issues on that page can cause a drop in sales. Ouch, we definitely don’t want that.
Open up the Page Timings report under Site speed and select click the page you want to look at.
You can see the same stats as before, but, this time, they are specific to this page.

Creating an email alert

You can use this information to gather your baseline for expected behavior. Take a look at your average page speed and look at the chart for peaks and trends.
Let’s say that the average page load time is 5.43 seconds and you see peaks hitting 8s. We want to be notified whenever this average crosses our desired top line, for the sake of this example, we want to be notified when it reaches 8s.

To create the alert, go to the admin tab, and on the view column, click the Custom Alerts option.
Create a new alert, set a name and select the following:
* Period – Day. We want to be alerted of anomalies and suspicious behavior. You can, later on, create an alert for longer periods.
* Check the send me an email checkbox and select an email address
* Under alert conditions, keep the All Traffic selection
* Change the “Alert me when” option to Content-> Avg. Page Load Time (sec).
* Set the condition to “Is greater than”
* And finally set the value to 8.

As you can see there are a lot of options for alerts. If we were to work with a longer period, we could use a percentage increase or look at completely different stats.

In the next post, we will see how to increase the speed of WordPress based websites using plugins.