iudaea - Web Analytics and random thoughts

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. Continue reading High Bounce Rate »

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

I love HMV.

I usually go to HMV and walk around for more than an hour just to look at their Comedy and Game sections. I had this chat with one of their sales representative. I was looking for "Stella Street" and they didn't have it in store. He told me that I might find it online and HMV would send it to my doorstep for free. Free? Sweet! I love comedies? Who doesn't like a good laugh? I was browsing their "Comedy" section, the "TV comedy" section to be more precise. (Does it rings like SEGMENTATION to you?) and then decided to add "Stella Street" to my virtual cart. I though to myself "I might as well buy some comedies that I like".I went on and on adding more comedies to my cart, did I mention that I bought only Box-sets or complete shows? (Oh my god, you thought about SEGMENTATION again weren't you?) I was ready to order and then I realised that 'Stella Street' cost much more than what I was planing to pay so I removed it from my cart. (Did someone TRACKED THAT EVENT? This should be a gold-mine for HMV's marketers). Well, I registered and made the order as you can see below (click on the image):You might notice that all are TV comedies (Yes, including "Armando Iannucci" which was listed in that section).Having all that information, HMV is sending most random stuff to my email address. I'm getting offers from nature related DVD's to whatever trying to cross-sell. I am a consumer like every other PERSONA. I really think HMV has enough information to create a nice profile of Eran, they should already know how to TARGET my needs.

Tags: Armando Iannucci, Stella Street, Yes

Does this sound  familiar? I adopted this understanding when I decided 5 years ago to leave the software development arena and join my fellow internet marketers.Eric T. Peterson wrote in his book "Web Analytics Demystified" that the future of web analytics might enable us to profile each and every one of the visitors (persona's as he calls them) when they come knocking on the doors of the website (even if they try to enter from the window).I believe he is correct. Some might develop more statistical strategies and some may look at the widest picture the machine can generate. Either way it is the age of the specific.The concept of this blog is to provide a more in depth understanding of this fascinating field known as web analytics. I'll will provide case studies and examples that I ran into daily. I hope you will enjoy the ride. Till next time. Eran

Tags: Eric T. Peterson, software development arena, web analytics