iudaea - Web Analytics and random thoughts

If you like this post, then please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed In his book "Web Analytics one Hour a Day" Avinash Kaushik is referring to the bounce rate as one of the most important factors an analytics practitioner would like to look at, I could not agree more myself.What is Bounce Rate?A bounce rate is simply a percentage of the visitors who came through the main gate of your Mall (your home page) or entered one of the shops (a page) and decided that they had seen enough and chose to leave after no longer than 10 seconds.There are two ways to look at the bounce rate in your website:

1. Overall site bounce rate: total number of visitors who saw one page of the site only / total number of visitors of the site.
2. Specific page bounce rate: Total number of visitors who saw one page of the site only entering through a specific touch point / total number of visitors who entered the site through that specific touch point.

Your goal of course, as the owner of the website, is to minimise the bounce rate as much as you can and to keep all the visitors engaged. Following Tyler Durden’s famous words, “Your website is not a unique snowflake”. Every websites around the web are experiencing a certain level of bounce rate, your job is to keep it to minimum. OK then, what should I do?There are actually more than one thing you might do. Let’s divide that to three main groups:1. Off site marketing collateralPPC and BannersShould you run PPC (or Banners) activity yourself or should you have an agency doing that for you. You might want to look at the Ad Copy, keywords and design and ask yourself the questions below:

• Do I have a clear “Call to Action”?
• Is the Ad Copy in Context with the landing page?
• Am I really bidding for the relevant keywords for that specific copy?
• Does the banner have the look and feel of the website?
• Is the banner a high quality one?
• Have I tried MVT or A/B testing to measure the effect of a specific banner on different landing pages for A/B or modules for MVT?
• Is my target audience just UK or US based? If so, why am I bidding in Hungary?

Facts: I have seen major companies spending a six figure budget a year on PPC campaigns resulting in a very high bounce rate. After answering all the questions above, they managed to drop the bounce rate instantly by an average of 7%. (one of them managed to drop it by 27%, imagine that!)EmailsShould you run email marketing activity? Pay attention to the following:

• Is the subject line aligned with the content on the landing page?
• Do I have relevant “power keywords” in my email to match the “power keywords” in the content shown on the landing page?
• Have I used a generic template or paid a good writer to send the message?
• Are the graphics in my email aligned with the theme of my landing page?
• Have I checked the ratio of HTML/Text emails ? How many opened etc.?
• Have I purchased a list or used those provided by my visitors?

Facts: From my experience, emails are by far THE BEST (and the cheapest) marketing tool. Using email marketing correctly not only reduces the bounce rate but also improves your conversion rate.SEOShould you run SEO marketing activity (or get that for free without any effort)? Pay attention to the following:

• Are the search keywords aligned with the target landing page?
• Check the correlation between the 1st tier search engines but also 2nd and 3rd tier. You might find some good insight about the relevance of a specific landing page to the keywords searched.

Facts: I have worked with a major travel company for which the key phrase “Red Ass” drove an unbelievable amount of bad traffic to the landing page. No need to say that the bounce rate was also very high.AffiliatesShould you run an affiliate program, pay attention to the following:

• Does the incoming link aligned with the destination page?
• Can I remove some of affiliates who not perform and send me loads of high bounced traffic?
• Do they promote my website with high quality images and ad copy?

Facts: Show some love to your affiliates. They are here to help you convert. They spend a lot of money on paid traffic and when you the visitor is bounced they loose money, not you. Don’t hesitate to contact them personally, you would be surprised to know how a 5 minute chat will give you more targeted and engaged visitors when the traffic is coming from your affiliates.2. On site marketing collateralPopups, Surveys, Jumpy Banners, Sound – Ask yourself the following questions:

• How many visitors bounced after being exposed to a pop up? (Run a report to see all the bounce rates when pop-ups are the last touching point, I always recommend to Tag (yes, I’m a big fan of javascript tagging) in a specific hierarchy, it makes life much easier when running that report).How many visitors bounced after being exposed to a survey? Is that survey in context with the page?How many visitors pressed the mute button on the landing page? (You should have one if you don’t have one already!)

Mini sites, Umbrella site

• The website might be a part of a group of sites which you own. Please consider the following:Are you currently tracking all the sites? Visitors might be following links to your other sites. If so, it should not be counted in the bounce rate since they are still in your domain. (I have seen that many times, a corporation usually having a different website for each market it operates in).

Facts: Large corporations usually have a different website for each market they operate, tracking all their websites gave some of my clients a better and realistic bounce rate figure which was much lower than they thought.3. Technical issuesLoading time – Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can I reduce HTTP requests?
• Have I used an Expiry HTTP header to images, css etc. That will reduce the HTTP request and make the website load from the browser cache very fast.
• Have I used gzip to zip the component being downloaded to the client?
• Do I have multiple JavaScript on my landing page? (I see that over and over again, especially those who use AdServing software on their websites)
• Can I merge some of the JS files (or CSS) to one file?

Streaming Media – Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can I provide a good buffering time ? Should I use a proprietary service instead of killing my bandwidth and scaring my Visitors?
• What is the average buffer time for that bounced page?
• What is the average loading time of that stream? Is that a bounced page?

Facts: Visitors don’t want to wait. If they have to wait, they may go and pay a visit to your competitor which may result in both loosing a potential customer and getting you a higher bounce rate.Manage expectations! If for some reason you cannot make the loading time faster, let the visitor know that the website is about to load and show him an appropriate message that will make him think :”This website takes a huge amount of time to load but they seem friendly. I’ll wait and see, it might be worth it”.

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Tags: Avinash Kaushik, Have I, HTML, HTTP, Hungary, search keywords, Streaming Media, tier search engines, travel, Tyler Durden, United Kingdom, United States