I have long suspected that Google may be using their analytics for more than we know. Ever since watching Matt Cutts pull up every domain a guy at Pubcon had ever registered, live in front of an audience, I have been worried. Call me paranoid, but I just have to wonder what information they are gathering and compiling into some huge database by all of us happily placing their tracking code on our sites.

Now this may or may not be a coincidence, but something very funny happened with a new site I had launched recently. This site was created to send leads to an affiliate offer. It’s more than just a landing page, but that’s the general idea of the site. I was running an Adwords campaign with some good results. All my bids were in the range I wanted, all keywords active. Then I installed Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages. Within 3 hours of doing that, ALL my bids for every keyword in the campaign went to $10 and switched to inactive. Now this seems like quite a coincidence like I said before. Is Google using analytics to determine landing page quality and relavancy?

You be the judge.

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of you landing pages is through Google Analytics Bounce Rate metric. This particular report can be found under content optimization, navigational analysis, entrance page bounce rates. With a bit of tweaking you can view a chart like this:

So what does this show? Well, like in golf, a lower number is better here. The lower the percentage, the more people are clicking through your landing page and taking the action you want them to. The higher the percentage, the more people are abandoning your landing page. In the example above, the landing page with the 46.3% rate is the most effective page, while the 76.5% page is pretty bad. This is a tremendously important way to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages.

It’s also import because it gives you an even more detailed view than just conversion rate. For example if you have a 5% conversion rate, you still don’t know how many people are abandoning your landing page versus abandoning the affiliate offer page. By looking at bounce rate, you can tell not only the average rate that users click through your page, but also you now know how many users get all the way to the affiliate offer page then quit without buying. Pretty good stuff.