Rant: Looked at my Google Analytics after 3 months and realized I was chasing vanity metrics the whole time

I run a small ecommerce site selling handmade leather goods, nothing huge maybe 200 orders a month. For months I was obsessed with traffic numbers and page views. Thought I was killing it when I saw 5,000 visitors a month. Then I actually looked at the behavior flow last Tuesday and saw 80% of those people were bouncing off my homepage in under 10 seconds. They were coming from some random blog post that went semi-viral on Pinterest but had nothing to do with what I sell. I was basically celebrating random tire kickers. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized a metric you were proud of was basically useless?

2 comments

2 Comments

noahchen2d ago

I mean, is it really that big of a deal that 80% of those visitors bounced? You were getting 5,000 people to your site, even if they didn't buy anything, that's still eyeballs on your brand name. Maybe it's just me but I feel like people get way too worked up over traffic that doesn't convert immediately, some of those tire kickers might come back later if they remember you.

margaretf402d ago

Respectfully @noahchen, 80% is a really high bounce rate that usually means something's broken on your landing page.