A simple concepts, and a bit of review… Chances are, you’ve placed some content on your web site or blog and made it available for your users to download. If that is the case, I’m guessing you believe your content to be useful to your audience (and it probably is).
Wouldn’t it be helpful to know exactly how many times your content is, in fact, downloaded? Here is the simple code to install on your site (assuming you are using Google Analytics) to track the each download event of each file:
onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/_custom‘); ”
This code is placed inside the href tag and after the link file name. The portion noted in red above ‘custom’ is your way of differentiating between types of content you may offer up on your site for more granular tracking. (eg. white_papers, case_studies, etc.)
So a completed link might look like this:
<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/white_paper’); “>
Things to think about if your download counts are low:
- Is the document download link strategically placed on the page or hidden within the content?
- Is the document link labeled appropriately (might consider a call-out)
- Is the actual landing page where the download is offered well structured and search optimized?
- Is the landing page buried several clicks deep on your site?
These are some areas for trial and error to improve visibility of your downloadable content. Try to modify one of all of the above to improve exposure to your content.
Our web content should serve a purpose for our audience – that being said, we need to know how it’s performing.
Search Keyterms (or key words) are still a primary focus in web site search engine optimization and do continue to contribute to higher search result ranking. While search rank should not be a primary focus, it should one of many internet marketing goals. However, there is no point in achieving high search result ranking if the landing pages that are ranking well are doing nothing for your website conversion rate.
To put it another way (and to be blunt), if your content stinks and your landing pages lack the organization or information your visitors want or need, all the rank in the world will do absolutely no good for you. In fact, it will drive business elsewhere.
If you are using Google Analytics (or other similar analytical tools), you should be watching this information and making adjustments accordingly. Let’s review a real-life example. Customer “X” sells a particular type of gloves online. Of the top 20 performing web site keyterms, 6 of them are related to a paticular type of glove which is not selling well. Out of those 6 search terms, 5 of them rank in the top ten positions in Google (or display on Google Page 1 search results). When looking at sales, these gloves are just not selling. This lends to the question… why?
Why are these gloves not selling if most of our web traffic is coming from those search terms and they have great Google search rank?
We dug in a bit deeper and checked out the keyterm bounce rate for Google traffic and the associate landing page specific bounce rate. Here’s what I found… The average bounce rate for those 6 keyterms was over 80% – Not Good.
The above graph is showing those top 6 performing keyterms and what the individual bounce rates are for each. With that average bounce rate being almost 84%, we quickly realized there was an issue with the content related to those search terms. To take it to the next level we can dig in to each of those keyterms and review the top landing pages for each.
The above graph shows that the top performing keyterms from the first chart has 2 associated landing pages. We can then dig into those associated landing pages. In this real life example, we learned there was a gross pricing error on their site, which made their gloves appear twice as expensive as their online competition. No wonder they were not selling anything!
We were able to take real data and make sense of the fact that even though search results were fantastic, the site just wasnt working. The product descriptions had errors that were causing customers to go elsewhere to buy the same product.
If your bounce rates are high it could mean several things (Read “Does Your Website Have Static Cling?“). If it’s a product page, review the product description, pricing, shipping information. If it’s not a product page, review the page layout and content. Find out what your users are looking for when searching on those related terms and adjust your page content accordingly to improve conversions.
Please don’t ignore your bounce rate. There is so much it can tell you about your web sites performance if you only just listen to what it’s telling you.
