Monitoring Keyword Bounce Rates with Google Analytics

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It’s confession time. Firstly, I have a blog. Secondly, it has a very high bounce rate. Now I’m not trying to make money from blogging or anything like that, but I do shed a small tear when I think: “Most people stop by for a quick visit, and then leave without looking around.”

Now there are a lot of articles out there that give pointers on how optimize your blog/site to reduce bounce rate, so I’m not even going to try and talk about that here. If you are after a good source of information, however, I’d recommend checking out problogger. What I am going to talk about though, is how you can use Google Analytics to determine where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics is very good at showing your overall bounce rate, but you can get more detail and start targeting particular posts and keywords to reduce that bounce rate.

Right, let’s get started:

Update: While the instructions below definitely give a good overview of how to complete the task, I subsequently decided to put together a screencast that guides you through the process more slowly. For those who like textual instructions, the original instructions are below the screencast.

Firstly, head over the Google Analytics top content report, which can be found under Content > Top Content.

Next, add the keywords for the content to the report. The image to the right shows how to do this, but basically look for the drop-down list to the right of the Page column heading.

Activate the advanced filter so we remove all of those pages that haven’t been hit as the result of an organic search.

Add a filter to exclude the string “(not set)”, removing those non organic search pages.

Now switch Google Analytics to the performance view of the report. This can be done by selecting the third icon along in the views selector, which is located top-right above the report table.

Now that you are in performance reporting mode, switch the performance field over to reporting on bounce rate. This can be done by selecting “Bounce Rate” from the individual page performance drop-down in the column heading of the report.

The end result will look something like what’s displayed below. Thankfully I’m not too susceptible to stats-envy

Now to make this report truly useful, I would recommend extending the timeline for the report to longer than a month (at least when first analysing the data). For my blog, I chose a six-month period. It’s certainly very telling. For me, I can see that I’m getting a fair bit of organic search traffic for android web applications on my iPhone and Android Web Application Frameworks post. Certain keyword combinations do better than others, but overall this could definitely be improved. So what does this tell me. Well if I have a few posts in the wings, then if I’m thinking about one related to Android that should take priority. Post it, and make sure I promote it from the post getting good organic traffic.

Finally, I used the Google Analytics export to PDF functionality to provide myself a good optimization worksheet. Before I did this though I did add an additional filter to cull some of the lesser visited pages on my site.

Anyway, I hope that’s as helpful to someone else as I found it myself, and certainly if there are other useful Google Analytics tips that people know I’d certainly love to hear about it.