Google Analytics

I have Google Analytics enabled. I started this just to see if anyone was looking at the site.

Now, I am trying to use it to optimize user experience. For example, a year or so ago, I had a bounce rate of ~75%. I Googled and found same ways to improve the bounce rate. These changes dropped the bounce rate to ~40%, which seemed good to me. I had relatively few pages view.

Around January 2020, one of my projects was selected as a best project. And the site's traffic went from ~75 unique users per month with few returns to 1,400 users with many returning users. But my bounce rate went to over 80%. The tactics I used before don't seem to have any impact on the bounce rate.

Tactics:

• • To Do: Provide a link to another page early in the page to reduce bounce rate ???

    • To Do: This doesn't work: Add something like the reusable steps box on the page Electronics as an enticement to click to another page. I added a box on 7/9 to Network Monitor page and bounce rate went down by 6% on 7/10. Is this trend or just one-off? Bounce rate is at 83% on 22AUG.

    • To Do: This works! Split pages with high bounce rates into multiple pages using Previous and Next buttons. I'll try with restful api, which has 14 page views and average page duration is 6:59 minutes and bounce rate is 92.86% as of 15AUG2020. Restful API dropped to 63.16% by 22AUG. I also applied this to Using Alexa to control raspberry pi, which has 71 pages view and duration of 2:09, and 88.24% bounce rate as of 15AUG2020. Alexa page dropped to 77.19% by 22AUG.

  • Eliminate keywords and phrases that might be attracting people who are uninterested in the content

  • Improve page load time, must be less than 2s

    • Reduce the size of image (6in max width or height adn 72dpi using png)

    • Use Pingdom Speed test tool to get page load times

    • Use Expires headers - not sure how to do this on Google Sites

    • Google Sites has a ~400KB script, which uses more than 1/3 of most page sizes

  • Google Sites isn't very good for mobile devices. I am not sure what I can do about this, except change to another platform

    • Google’s mobile-friendly test tool

      • robots.txt blocked two of Google Site's scripts - smh

  • For a while, Google Sites didn't provide a valid certificate. This is fixed.

    • • Domain Cert Checker