Well it depends. We had started to set up on a Friday the analytics for a large existing site. We know that several key areas are used more than others, and some of the pages rarely get seen. While in the past articles I’ve not gone into how do you set up your application, this is a key element of the process. Without good (enough) data, you can never make good decisions on your web site. Site configuration is often the first place to look.
The first few days was busy trying to get the data in to all of the pages. This is difficult as it is a site which uses a specially configured web application, and little things can throw off its balance – causing the pages to not load.
After the first few days – I noticed a big spike in the bounce rate. While I considered the original rates to be semi-normal as this is a business-to-business (B2B) web site, I wasn’t expecting that huge jump when we went from testing to live. Looking into it, several files were not properly uploaded on the production server, and thus while activity continued as normal, the pages were not being counted.
The next morning was spent double checking the files, and we went from ~70% bounce rate to 22-25%. This is a much more accurate representation.
Now that we know our files are being checked, we can trust our data better, and start to draw some conclusions from what is going on in the site.
About Walter Wimberly