41% of Web Users are Stupid

Today I've had confirmation that a large proportion of web users are stupid. I'm sure we all secretly thought this but here's my proof.

Farleys Solicitors own www.farleys.com, they have done for over 10 years, as archive.org shows: web.archive.org/web/*/farleys.com. Farley's Fun Pub in Las Cruces, New Mexico has an auto-generated entry on Google Places (formerly Local Business Center). It looks like this:

You can tell that it auto-generated because it says in the top left corner "Business Owner?" If it was a listing for a verified business, it is indicated here. You will see from the image that the URL is farleys.com. Rather than leading to an American steakhouse, this URL points to our client, the Lancashire full service solicitors' firm.

Because of this mistake, I am not surprised to see queries with "las cruces" in our reporting. However, Google Analytics produces some surprising results. When the keywords are filtered to show only queries that feature "cruces" I found that the bounce rate is 58.78%.

Of course this would be too high for a normal site, but when every single one of the 131 visitors during May that this referred to has come to the site expecting to find a restaurant and been presented with a legal site, I would expect this number to be far closer to 100%!

This bounce rate means that 41.22% of visitors who came to the site clicked on to a further page before they left. The average time on site of 44 seconds also indicates that visitors read the landing page.

The main lesson to be learnt from this is that if you have a business you need a website - Farleys New Mexico don't appear to have one - and if you have a website, get it on Google maps. In this case, not doing so has lost 131 potential diners in one month.