Bounce Rates on Google Analytics

I was just discussing what Bounce Rates were in Google Analytics and thought this could be a potentially confusing term and would be helpful to blog about. I also work with WebTrends .

We have a client that has a site with us that had a high bounce rate and a high exit rate. (50% for some pages) Anything above 20% would be something worth looking into in my opinion, but the differences change depending on the site, product, sales process and design so everyone has their owne level of normal as a benchmark and you try and improve from there.

They wondered if this Bounce Rate was an issue, as many clients would.

The thing is, it may not be an issue to have a high Bounce Rate because if people land on a product description page and then click to buy (or in our case, apply) is this really bad?

Well the qualifier for a Bounce Rate is that they viewed that one page and left. This does not include someone clicking on a link on the page to buy/apply. That would be an exit. They would not have viewed any other page on the site or interacted (clicked) anything else either. This bounce would be from hitting the back button or clicking the x button on the browser.

Exits from the site are considered people who have viewed more than one page and finished their visit. They may click to apply/buy or they may x-out of the window or they may reload the home page. (just a few of many examples) One tricky thing is when someone gets a site that launches a new window for a page you click on. That is typically an exit and new site visit. 

So, is this good or bad? For this client I think it is ok, because they are very stringent about who they are looking to hire and when people see the extensive requirements I am pretty sure most people would realize whether they had a shot at the job or not very quickly and either click forwards in the path to apply (on an Applicant Tracking System application site, (don’t ask, too many sites linked with too many processes)) or back out. It is very straight forward and very few other options are on the page.

How do you reduce bounce rates?

I never hear people talk about strategies to get more qualified traffic to these pages, I just hear about providing more info on the page to help them convert. That is a great strategy and if you can link exact search terms to the appropriate products/jobs with a page designed for one clear desired action then you are doing well. If you can suggest other related alternatives on the same page, maybe on the right sidebar, you are doing even better. If you have an email sign-up that says, not what you are looking for? Sign up here and we’ll email you when new ones come up. Great. But if you have a lot of traffic bouncing even then, you may want to look at the source. What words are your pages optimized for and why do those keywords not match what you’re providing or asking people to do? Maybe search is also not the right medium to find people based on the Google Insights search volume for that term and you are getting similar searches/clicks but not for what you offer. Maybe reel in the search efforts and go for more qualified means of finding these specific people like email, targeted display ads (by content/interest, behavior or location) or offline communication. (gasp!)

Remember Google Analytics (or any analytics package) is not just about a bunch of numbers and bunk. If you can’t figure out what the human behavior is behind the numbers or what the actual user/customer wants they don’t mean much of anything except that your site is up and running.

Why I dislike Large Blogs

I love blogs. I have been blogging since 2002 when my friend Mugsy emailed me and told me to sign up for LiveJournal. A lot has changed about blogging since then, but the revolutionary idea that if you can type, you can publish easily in a word-processing-like interface on the internet has not. The method of blogging to share knowledge by and for non-programming type people is still spreading to the corners of the globe and helping people’s voices be heard in ways we never thought possible.

At the same time I am growing more frustrated with the technorati and the overload of emails, posts, rss feeds and spam arriving on my accounts daily. I am trying my best to stay on top of the active topics in  the  user generated content world as it has forked into many roads that include blogging, social networking, social ads, microblogging and a whole host of a million little startups with other concepts they want to share with the world. (more than can be kept up with or can survive even if they do all innovate)

I have had to scale back my online content consumption several times over the years when it was in danger of taking over my life and all my time. But lately this getting married thing has taken a large chunk of time out of my life too, (even after the wedding) and as a result I am trying to glean all my updates and news knowledge into smaller and smaller bits of time. (apparently being married means I have to do work around the house and spend a lot of time trying to motivate my husband to stop watching hours of TV and do things around the house. Life just got more complicated and we have to learn how to cook, fix things, do laundry and empty the cat-poop-box with much larger quantities now). My work is also very busy (analytics and metrics seem to go nuts in recessions) and no spare time is to be had anywhere in the schedule.

Therefore, I have gone through many iterations of un-subscribe weeks in my email boxes and cut back drastically on email newsletters, of which once I found very enlightening. Most marketing/advertising/analytics/metrics/SEO/SEM email newsletters  these days aren’t as willing to share any real actionable info without you spending a lot of $ so out they go.

I tried to update myself by trying an RSS reader again (3rd try) and I think its been a few months but I am overwhelmed by that too. Its way to easy to get more than 1,000 unread items in the reader and when it doesn’t tell me the exact number anymore I am less motivated to tackle it because it seems impossible.

I have found Google Reader to be good for sunday afternoon fun feed reading and more personal fun  topics/blogs though. Home design is a great topic in the reader since you really have to see it all to learn.

On the other hand I am re-subscribing to some email newsletters and just un-subscribing altogether to others who insist on posting 30-50 items per day! (assholes!) How is one person supposed to read that many posts per blog per day? It’s impossible and on some level, rude.

I know why they do this. It is partially a play to keep new items being published every few hours to keep the Internet addicts coming back for more traffic and it is also a play for search engine dominance by having more content in the engine for every possible term than anyone else. These teams of writers churn out mostly regurgitated posts about content repurposed from other blogs without much new insight. Some do deliver genuine news and content you can use but scanning through 50 posts is way slower than scanning 5 emails. The content and pics seem to load soooo sloooowly and an email you read, scan and go to what you want quickly. Big offenders of this are ReadWriteWeb (on volume and not separating feeds), Silicon Valley Insider (regurgitating and trying to predict the future even though they’re usually wrong), SEO Roundtable, Apartment Therapy (OMG, holy re-post everyone elses content and fill up with summary posts daily to waste everyones time, generate page views and sell ads), Jalopnik (jebus stop showing us every detail of the 24 hours of Lemons in every city across the country and asking us what our favorite imaginary dream car in a movie with Bruce Willis: waste of space, use summary feeds please! On a cable bandwidth line it takes forever to load all these damn images!) and Media Post (phhbbtt). ALL THESE BLOGS have been banned from my RSS Reader. Some have been demoted to email updates but others are just gone.

Also, I’m not programmed to think to go see my rss feeds yet either so I often forget about them for several days after a good several hour scanning session finally getting the numbers down to below 200 new items. then I return the next time to see 1,000+ again and feel defeated. In contrast I have OCD about keeping a clean email box, and completely forget about facebook until I am completely bored. I guess that is a sign of my age bracket. (34)

I wish that this spammy fluf put out there to fill space could be eliminated. I also wish that these blogs would split their feeds into sections so you would be able to just get the posts you were interested in. Like if new original content and re-purposed other people’s content were separated in 2 feeds, it would be a big help.

I would also recommend that they stop doing summary posts. They piss me off. I wait a minute or 2 for something to load in the darn reader only to see its the same posts from the local editions of the same blog.  Poo, if that happens 15 times in a day I could have spent that time sleeping and then I’m annoyed. 

These blogs also do this because they are in some get-rich-quick rush to make money as a profitable business before Google figures it out and bans them or something. Yes, blogs have an elitism to them that says, duh, if I can make a slice of the money publishing from what the Tribune used to, I am going to do this as fast and as hard as I can. And it over saturates the web with watered down content that is just filler mostly, even if it does increase ad impressions and some adsense revenue if you’re into web-welfare payments.

I also would like to recommend that if you want to start a blog you keep the posts to no more than 2-3 a day and resist the urge to just regurgitate other people’s posts and link to them saying how great they are. Research things you are really interested in and share your own unique experiences. Any web-bot can be an aggregator, what we need more of is real people sharing experiences and knowledge to make social media stick and not die out because of spam/splogs and info-overload. It is these people who become trusted advisors and get the visitors who come back again and again.

And this is also better for the rest of us who have to go clean the cat-poop-box and have a life offline now that they are married.

Update 10/29/09

http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use-google-reader-anymore

I guess Robert Scoble agrees with me to a point, though he blames Google Reader for a bad format and experience and not the blog owners for copious amounts of useless content hiding the good stuff. I guess there is always room for improvement and certain people discover it before others depending on how they use the info/product.

Update 11/5/09

How much content is too much content? Read Write Web chronicles these mega content sites and their race to populate the web all by themselves by posting 200+ posts per day. We should call it the Answers.com business model.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_age_of_mega_content_sites.php

Blog Template Redesign

I just noticed that WordPress had some new template CSS designs available and I decided to update around here a bit. I hope you like this clean white bright design from their library of options, I thought it looked cool.

I am in a bit of a blog catch up month since the wedding is past and work is now the crazy part of my life. I hope that by month’s end (Aug 09) I will be updating my collection of blogs more than once a week. (each!) I know its a challenge but I really enjoy how different Blogging is than my regular day job in data analysis of online advertising. Sure numbers are cool, but sometimes you need a break from all the format requests for millions of little excel tables in minuscule fonts. (that are of course needed all on the same day and only with 24 hours notice or less).

All in all I am tired, but blogging still excites me and I am happy to have a job in the current market, even though I get frustrated just like everyone else at some point. So, I will hopefully be more active on the Protagonist5 blog again soon.

ps- Why does WordPress come up as a mis-spelled word in the spellcheck of the WordPress.com editor?

Six Creative Uses for RSS « eMarketing & New Media Trends

Six Creative Uses for RSS « eMarketing & New Media 

I thought that this was a good article, it outlines that RSS is still not used as much as it should be considering how versatile it is. Sometimes it has to do with a lack of technology knowledge about feeds and other times by the limitations of your reader. I have gotten away from feeds though for a different reason entirely, there is just too much info out there to keep up with, so I gave up trying in mid-2005. I am happier now to just read things as I run across them rather than having to see that all my feeds have been read and subscribing to everything I see that had one interesting post back in 2004. I do think that rss has more to give as far as mashing up content and re-purposing it as well as searching and delivering info also, but we haven’t really seen good user interface WYSIWYG tools for non-programmers yet to really access that potential. I hope in 08 things evolve further and RSS is a big winner.

Google Earth adds a weather layer to maps

This is interesting. Google has partnered with weather.com and Naval Research Labs Meteorology labs to provide weather information on Google Earth maps. (maybe on gas pumps too?) I think this is very logical and makes perfect sense. I am suprised though with all the $ Google has that they didn’t launch some sattelites and provide weather on their own. This new way of doing business with partnerships is not the traditional way for Google. They like to own the technology for themselves and not outsource. So, I am curious if these other sources will be reliable enough and timley enough for google’s demands. It can’t be an easy job providing anything for Google, they are pretty perfect all the time and expect you to be too.

I wonder what Tom Skilling thinks of the new weather on Google earth?

Fun Holiday Personality Test Quiz Game – Emo Emo Time

Hah, the holidays are here again, and here come the fun site games and quizzes to match! Maybe you’re Emo about the whole thing? (Emo means emotional for those of us over 30) How about the How Emo am I Test? I know I am more emo this time of year. It’s just frustrating that on top of all your other daily responsibilities with work and home and sometimes your friends expectations, you have to go be cheery at all these company parties and make like you have it all under control. You have to fake it that all the shopping done, money for all this crap isn’t an issue and that you love spending your evenings and weekends with your coworkers and boss socializing. Sure! It’s great! I’m EMO already!

Decorating Ideas

Ugh I have been dragged along on so many trips for home decorating and furniture buying that I am almost happy that I have old furniture now. It really has been a bit much. Yes crate and barrel (what does that name mean anyway?) Macys and John M SMithe’s stores are fun initially but then you really just want to stop battling Saturday afternoon crowds for parking spaces especially since the holidays are coming up. But my friend is still trying to furnish her new home. (heh they bought before the market crashed this fall)

I have to wonder though what makes a good furniture store? Not many of these stores seem to have a lot of buyers when we are there. And at those prices I can see why. How many sofas do they have to sell to make a profit? How many different ways can you twist up posts to make styles of brass and metal beds? Why won’t they listen to me when I suggest hillsdale furniture shopping online instead? Oy! Anyway I have resigned  myself to the fact that I won’t be able to sell my condo any time soon and get a new house or place so it’s just a bit much right now to be spending this much of my weekends shopping with her. I think its time for a new hobby.

Greeting Cards Contest – Art Students

If you are a weekend artist or you have always wanted to work for Hallmark or Martha Stewart this might be for you. When I was a kid I did a lot of drawing, I don’t anymore but it is still something a lot of people go to school to learn and keep active with throughout their lives. I ran across a contest and wanted to blog about it because it offers a $10,000.00 prize for the winner and you get your design published on a greeting or on corporate christmas cards as well. It is a great stepping stone into that profession of graphic design for cards and paper products that a lot of people want to get into. Here are some of the rules to enter the greeting cards scholarship contest:

You have to be over the age of 14

You must be a student enrolled in high school or college

You must be a legal US resident

Only one application entry is allowed per person

The submitted artwork or photos must be your own original work 

The contest ends January 15, 2008

If you submit it they own it and can use it as they like even if you don’t win which could still be a stepping stone fr your career even if you aren’t the big winner.

Review of Sidestep for traveling

I first heard about sidestep.com for traveling about 3 years ago. Someone in my office was using it to find travel deals on flights they had to make for work. The company did not have a policy about using a travel agency so it was up to each person to find their own flights and book them on their own. I still do this, since you never know if there will be a flight when and where you want it if someone else is booking. I am also really picky about which airlines and which airports I use. I have traveled enough to know some are crappy and so frustrating it’s not worth saving 20 bucks. So, I am looking at Sidestep again today and see that round trip flights for a week in Hawaii from ORD are $879.00.  (yes, we have a client in Hawaii, and some extra time there with Maui outdoor activities would be fun)   The site takes a long time to load the search results because it is pinging for data at so many other sites. After that I get a long list of airfares from all kinds of airlines. You get to purchase direct from the airline and Sidestep earns a commission for the sale. It pretty much condenses your search and really works for finding new airfares you don’t see listed elsewhere. So now about Hawaii…

Carbon Neutral Search Engine

If you are like me you like all kinds of new green products that are coming on the market these days and reducing the carbon footprint we all have in life. Organics help us and the earth, squiggley bulbs help save a ton of energy and Al Gore nobel prize winning dude’s movie The inconvienient truth showed us that we all have choices we make every day that impact the planet and we can make small changes that have a big impact over the world as a whole. I think more people are accepting that Global Warming is happening in their lives and making changes now. One new cool site I found out about is the Carbon Neutral Search Engine. I think that using online search and computers in general over mountains of paper is better already, and when a search engine offsetts its carbon production from things like electricity and travel it’s even better. (how can the companies we all work for be more green too?) I think that the process is that they fund green projects by buying carbon credits and those green energy processes offsett their regular energy use. Its just a greener way to search. Check out their blog for more detailed information!

Wired Science . Video: Cool Whip | PBS

Check this video about what is reall in Cool Whip. YIKES! I firmly believe that if we knew what was really in most processed foods we would not eat them. So much of it isn;t really made from food. It’s all chemicals and fake manufactured stuff. Its not digestable either and we have no idea what the long term affects are of these chemicals on our bodies. Hello cancer. Why is it so hard to find simple natural good food?

My New Favorite TV Show: Wired Science on PBS

I was home for once last night and ran across the new PBS show WIRED Science on channel 11 in Chicago. I liked it a lot. The presenters seem a little young and a little rushed but otherwise its really very informative and entertaining at the same time. Its the kind of gig I would like as a TV presenter if you could choose your dream job. (if TopGear hosting wasn’t available in the  dream job drop down menu) They were featuring several places that were in the magazine in past months. My subscription ran out and I didn’t renew it because I rarely have time to read, so it is great that a TV show has popped up instead. Just in time. They went to a meteorite searching guy’s field and dug up a real meteorite (rather than a meteorong, say that out loud…) There was also a very very cool guy growing genetic replica organs in a lab and using actual HP printer cartridges to print them out with cells. (I am so not kidding, do you know how F-ing amazing that is???? Both for the new organs and the HP printer cartridges) They also talked to a theoretical physicist and went into a deep tunnel to see how neutrinos are studied. I am still not sure what a neutrino is, because my cat was meowing the whole time and I was trying to reason with him. Don’t ever try to reason with a cat, they always win. Anyway, I do know what the Neutrino Project is. It’s a live improv show about making an movie by put on by Fuzzy Gerdes and the cast. They film edit and show a real movie in every show. Maybe Wired Science should cover that too? Anyway the show is on Wednesday nights on Chanel 11 PBS in Chicago at 8pm cst.

Holiday Christmas Shopping Target

I am one of those people who like to have all the Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving so that I never have to deal with huge mall crowds or long lines wasting my weekends in December. Plus aren’t there a million holiday parties to go to in December? They start early in the month with the work related ones and then continue to friends, family and your own household. So do yourself a favor and start your shopping now.

The first step is writing a list of people that you have to buy gifts for. If you are unsure if a neighbor or coworker would be getting you a gift or not, err on the side of caution and get them something small even if they don’t end up getting you something. It’s always better to be generous than not.

Then there are a million sites online that can help you shop and some even have online coupons for extra discounts. Most guys on your list will be interested in electronics and gadgets. The best place for those is Amazon and there are Amazon coupon codes here. Target is also a great place for shopping for kids gifts. I have to send some cute gifts to both my honorary nieces this year and plan to look for educational toys at Target. They also have cute clothes and books for kids that are great too. There are some Target Coupons here.

It’s never too early to start planning because when December comes you will have enough to deal with for the parties you have to attend and the food and decoration preparation you do in your own home. Why not get all the shopping done now, and check that off the list first?

Virtual Worlds Collide – War between Second Life and WoW?

Ok it was a little beyond my reach that people would set up so much of a life in the virtual worlds of either World of Warcraft (of which I found out has dragons in the new Toyota Tundra commerical) and Second Life.  I am about at the level of sims version 1998 myself so I can’t get that into these places and wonder how these young people do. Do they not work? Do they not enjoy television or movies anymore? Ok, all generational differences aside I did hear that they are going to look at inter world operability somehow and that this could cause attacks on second life by the WoW dragons? I am still trying to get my head around what you do in these alternate reality worlds and now they could potentially start wars between eachother? This not only will be unknown to most people who are offline, it will cause ripples through the bandwith availability and economies of the real world. Boy how crazy is that virtual worlds would effect the real economy since people do spend real money for access to new stuff in those worlds?

Facebook Apps and Social Networking

I am not a huge fan of Facebook, I am more a MySpace person because well, I am getting older and it seems more primitive and understandable to me. But today through one of those many many email newsletters i get I saw there was a graphing social networks conference coming up. I immediately thought, how many people are into social graphs that there can actually be a conference? Isn’t that the play of uber programmer geeks and UI specialists? It’s a very exclusive club that I can’t join because my UI experience is low and my programming experience is non-existent. But yet I am still curious, like many people are, about emerging internet things. We all wonder when visual search and semantic search will finally really happen. It’s like the holy grail of convergence, that like true convergence, may not actually happen.

But what I found out about this conference is it’s not about drawing webs of how many people you know on the internet and linking them by different colors in Venn diagrams about their shared tastes. It is about things like facebook apps and social network applications off of the networks too. It has all the technorati A lister dignitaries attending, which means like the old blogging conferences I used to attend (Syndicate anyone?) it probably is too cutting edge and these technologies won’t go mainstream or won’t make money or both. They will have a lot of very intelligent discussion but alas its more about convincing eachother of their superior sales pitch or their product’s whiz bang goodness, and not really going much farther than that.

Plus I just saw some disappointing results from Facebook on a personal note with some work that I have been doing. MySpace performs way better in the way we needed them to. But it’s always neat to get distracted from work and go play around with some neat new cool sites and think about their data and what they have to say about trends in the internet world. So here are some cool sites that are sponsoring the conference. I’d skip the conference and maybe not work with these companies just yet, but I would keep an eye on it all for a little while and see where it goes. It could be huge you know… (Hype!)

http://www.popfly.com/ I got an invite but because I don’t have developer API keys, I can’t do anything with it.

Topix.com I’m not a fan, but recently some of their local commenting pages have given me hope to local search and communities. Maybe it was a good buy?

http://www.sometrics.com/demo/ Coolio! But I have no idea what this is good for except popular facebook apps and what some limited demographics are for the users… (I say coolio when I mean cool, it’s left over from about 10 years ago, sorry)

http://www.socialmedia.com/ A smaller less popular version of a sometrics.

The others like Plaxo aren’t my faves, but hey they might be useful for you…Check them out and see what you think…I’m not hyping anything.