OK, so I'm really getting into this web analytics craze, you see. Before I started seriously tracking traffic to my various sites, including this one, I really had no idea the kinds of things I would eventually find out about what visitors are doing when they, well, visit. What an epiphany I had when I could realize what the heck people were really interested in!

Today, using Google Analytics and the previous six months of tracking data therein, I figured out the top five forums that keep visitors looking beyond landing on the forum page. In other words, which five forums have the most interesting topics that visitors want to click and read? Here they are in reverse order...

5. Louisville History — 18th and 19th Century

4. Kentucky and Indiana Politics

3. The Louisville Economy (now named Louisville Economic Development)

2. Louisville Historic Preservation and Presentation

1. Louisville Media and News


Wow, this teaches me quite a big lesson — Stay current on media, historic preservation and economic issues, and LouHI can't go wrong. What especially humbled me is that one of my favorite forums to post topics in, Louisville Transportation, was in 7th place. I won't stop posting there, of course, as I feel it's an important subject, but I will certainly have to give more heed to the subjects visitors care most about. Also note that the Louisville Metro Government and Politics forum ranked #9 — kind of frightening as it's also a favorite subject area of mine, but I have a feeling it will go up in rank over the next year or so. Mayor's race, Hello!

Another thing I found out is that the front page of the site is rather sticky, and that's not even taking the latest board changes into account. Its bounce rate was 32.51% — anything below 35% is considered healthy in the analytics realm, and so of course I'll take it! This basically means that over 2/3 of the visitors who come to the front page see something they like and click on it. That is thrilling to me and tells me a lot about the power of what's possible as I continue to enhance what I'm now calling the Board Portal.

The most delightful thing I discovered is that the bounce rate for the Most Recent Topics page is 26.95%. It's doing a fantastic job of reeling in visitors.

Now, on to the results that caused alarm bells for me...

When visitors land on the Search page as the first page they see on the site, 97.63% of them bounce away. And even for those who don't hit this page first, 58.66% exit the page after arriving on it. Horrifying! This is, of course, causing me to do some major brainstorming on what I can do to alleviate this issue, especially as this page is the 5th most viewed page on the entire site.

To alleviate the Search page bounces, I'm thinking I would need to show recent searches (top recent, and most recent), and perhaps even some of the content those searches turned up, as a way of making the page more sticky. That's just one line of thinking. Do you have any Search page ideas I can consider that will help in keeping visitors here?

The other result that bothered me was that topics in general are terminating points for visits. They get both high bounce rates and high exit rates. But then, that's how traditional discussion boards are set up — one drills down to their topic of interest, consumes it, and leaves, as there is not usually anything sparking the individual to go look at something else. Topics are natural termination points. So, how to fix this? Perhaps the most obvious approach would be to show a list of related topics (matched by keywords) or perhaps the five other most recent topics in the same forum. With that, visitors might be more interested in continuing on. But would something like that be enough? Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

So, there you have it — an analysis of what visitors are really doing here. Some of the results overjoy me, and others make me want to jump off the roof (of a one-story house, mind you). But the bottom line is that analysis like this might actually help me (with your assistance) make this into a really successful discussion board. Here's hoping!

Steve Magruder — LouHI Administrator and web programmer


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