Hello, I Must Be Going.

Earlier this month, analytics provider One-Stat reported that 55% of site visitors viewed only 1 or 2 pages, and only 16.5% visited a third page. So within this sample, based on samples of 2 million web visitors at different sites in 100 countries, 80% of users left after seeing 1, 2, or 3 pages.

I've always thought it was useful to think about site visitors who leave quickly in terms of a physical store. If you stood at the counter of your shop all day watched people open the door, walk in two steps, and turn around and leave - especially hundreds or thousands of them - it wouldn't take long before you got really worried. Most likely, you would quickly ask a few of them what was wrong, or just start making changes to draw them in farther. But on the web we don't see these people come and go, and even when represented as numbers in log files, there isn't much impact. So every day they come and go in droves and nobody does much about it. Big mistake.

There are many reason why users come and go. It isn't always bad news if some people leave quickly. Some are in the wrong place and so neither of you benefit from their hanging around sucking bandwidth. Other might actually find just what they need quickly because your optimization or landing page strategy caused them to go directly to the right information. To really understand what numbers are appropriate for you, do some detective work with your analytics package and log files.

If log files show visitors arriving based on keywords that you didn't intentionally or don't want to target, a little effort de-optimizing (removing these words) might be a good idea. Of course, many words and phrases have multiple uses so this isn't always practical.

The bigger issue is clarity. Does your web site make it clear what information it contains. When people first arrive at your site, can they determine, in just a few seconds, what information the site contains and how to get to any information that isn't directly on the page they're looking at. This is a design, navigation, and usability problem. The statistics above show that 70% of visitors invest one or two clicks to look beyond the page they land on - they're giving you a shot. If you fail to get them to the info, or worse if you make them click on something that is wrong or leads to them to believe they're farther away from their goal, they're gone.

Every click a user makes is a decision on their part. They can either click for you (towards conversion) or against you (away from conversion). You have to watch them every step of the way :-)

{See Morningstar Multimedia for more comments on this topic.}

Posted by Craig Danuloff at April 2, 2004 11:15 AM