| Dec. 08 2006 at 8:25 AM |
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Every website has 404 errors Golfasian - I can create one right now - click on this link:
http://golfasian.com/this-page-does-not-exist.asp
If you click on that link, you'll hit your 404 error page - which I might add is actually a really strong error page, as it's customized and provides many options to navigate back into your active site. But a 404 page will kick up any time someone makes a request to your server for a page it can't find. The ways in which others can reach that are many, and many are out of your control (outside sites linking to yours, search engine indexes of your site, etc.).
There are a number of methods of "error trapping" - I googled error trapping, and came across an article about logging the source of the errors in ASP. That way you can get a better handle on what's causing people to reach that page, and hopefully alleviate the issue.
Hope this helps!
chuck fuller
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| Dec. 08 2006 at 8:30 AM |
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Tawnya wrote: One stat that I love looking at on my client stats is the EXIT PAGE area.
Exit rates are key Tawnya, and tracking trends in the rate for your key pages is vital for identifying areas of improvement.
It's always important to remember that your site-wide exit rate will always equal 100%, unless you're somehow able to get a large part of your audience to never navigate away from your website. And there will be some pages where a high exit rate is acceptable - as long as your purpose is to send traffic away from your site (a page which has a fair number of outbound links, or an affiliate-focused page, for example), then a high exit rate won't always be a bad thing.
But clearly if you have a page whose real purpose is to help visitors navigate through to other sections of your site, and you track consistent upticks in exit rate or the exit rate is just higher than you'd reasonably expect, it's time to take steps to reduce the number of people saying sayonara from that page. Test various elements and track religiously.
chuck fuller
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| Apr. 19 2007 at 12:14 PM |
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Excellent article and discussion. I had never considered exit rates. Is this something that you get from the Analytics programs or do you have some kind of code snippet that runs when a user exits?
Scott
http://modernforager.blogspot.com
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| Apr. 19 2007 at 12:34 PM |
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You should be able to get it from almost any analytics program Scott - it just entails the system logging where a session ended, so it's not a complicated metric to track for any decent piece of analytics software.
chuck fuller
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