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Why Bounces is a Better Metric than Bounce Rate

February 12th, 2010

This is the follow-up post on the bounce rate poll from Can You Answer this Simple Google Analytics Question?. If you did not vote yet, please do it before you read further.

The results are the following:

The correct answer is marked in the green box

As you can see, only 20% the voters got it right (only 25 votes). It’s not surprising as some of the reports in Google Analytics can be misleading, i.e. top content, content by title or content drilldown.

To find out the number of bounces (or the real bounce rate) one have to look at the landing page report, not at the content performance reports (top content, content by title or content drilldown). The reason is for that most of the time, a page will have a bounce rate only if it serves as landing page (single page visits).

For the example used in this poll

Misleading Bounce Rate

if one multiplies 826 (unique page views) by 52.17% (bounce rate) it results in 430 bounces, which totally wrong. Let me explain.

If you look at the landing page report (image below) for the same page, same time interval (dec 11, 2009 – jan 10, 2010), you’ll see that while the bounce is the sameas on any of the content performance report (52.71%) the real number of bounces is 24, which is not by far 52% of 826, but a merely 3% of it.

The Real Number of Bounces

If one will look at the Top Content report and see 10.000 unique page views (almost equal to visitors) with a 50% bounce rate, it might wrongly conclude that 5.000 visitors bounced.

So where is this confusion coming from? While the data in the Top Content, Content by Title and Content Drilldown reports are based on page views (unique or not) the bounce rate column is actually taking into related with data from other report and it’s computed based on the entrances to that specific page.

I think that the bounce rate in the aforementioned report should be supplemented by the Bounces column or. For that you can use the following custom report to have the bounce rate and the bounces in a single report.

If you wish you can use this custom report to look at the page views (I was not able to combine Unique Page views with Bounces in Google Analytics custom reports). I am looking at the page view columns as a relative importance of the page, then I look at the bounces and if the number is high compared to the page view I take a quick look at the bounce rate.

Custom report with pageview, bounces and bounce rate

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Posted in Don't Do Like Them, Google Analytics

Tags: bounce rate Google Analytics

Minimize the Impact of Website Testing on SEO

January 28th, 2010

A real concern anyone involved in A/B/n or multivariate testing should be worried about is what’s going to happen to the search engine optimization (SEO) efforts while, and after the test is done.

If you don’t set up and follow up your tests correctly – and I don’t mean how you setup your testing platform, but the technicalities of how you implement the test on your web server – you can encounter two major problems:

1. Duplicate content issues in search engines. In this case, the control version can be totally excluded from the index or the ranks can decrease

2. Browser bookmarkers. In case if your variation pages change URLs and they are bookmarked by visitors with the changed URLs, once a winner is found and you removed the variations URL, visitors will reach a 404 not found page

To address these issues I do the following:

1. Add the following meta tags in ALL variations of the tested page:

This will tell search engine spider not to index the page, not to follow the links and not to archive the test page(s) in their index. However, this is not working all the time so,

2. If your tested page changes URL (i.e. testing /olympics.php against /olympics_test.php) you should put the test page(s) under a different directory (i.e. www.mysite.com/testing/) and

3. Exclude tested URLs (complete directory of specific files) in your robots.txt file

To exclude directories use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/

To exclude just the file use (not recommended):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/olympics_test.php

4. If you’re testing variations using the same page URL with different parameters (i.e. /olympics.php against /olympics.php?test_ver=5) use the rel=”canonical” meta tag, to tell Google and the other search engines that the control page is the page they should index.

I add the line below in the <head> section for all variation pages (i.e. /olympics.php?test_ver=5):

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php” />

5. Tell you programmers and link builders not to link to your testing directory/page at all (IT should be careful about internal linking, and link builders should not link from external websites)

6. If you plan on testing minisites (more pages under the same testing directory) use “rel=”nofollow” on all internal links of the minisite. Additionally you can put all the links under Javascript so they won’t be followed by search engine bots

7. Once the test is concluded and you found a winner, do a permanent redirect (301) for all tested URLs to the winning URL. For example, in your .htaccess you can add:

RewriteRule ^(.*)mysite.com/testing/olympics_test.php$ http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php [R=301,L]

If you’ll implement all of the above you will have a better chance of not getting into duplicate content issues or ranking fluctuations, due to testing and experimentation.

However, if your pages do get indexed by search engines, you should take the necessary steps to minimize the impact on rankings, as soon as possible:

1. create a Google Webmaster account and keep an eye on your 404 page errors. Eventually ask for the test pages to be excluded from their index

2. create a custom 404.html page, then track and fix 404 errors with the help of Google Analytics. On your 404 error page, add this to your page tracking code:

pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” + document.referrer);

Your code should look something similar to:

try{

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x“);

pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” +

document.referrer);}

catch(err) {}

</script>

I hope this will address your boss’ concerns on SEO and it will provide more flexibility for testing!

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Posted in Conversion Optimization, Google Analytics, SEO

Tags: testing and seo

Can You Answer this Simple Google Analytics Question?

January 11th, 2010

Hey you, web analytics ninja, you think you can analyze websites? Look at the screenshot below and answer this simple question:

What is the number of bounces for the red squared page?

Bounces in Google Analytics

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If you wish to find the correct answer, please subscribe to my blog. I will publish the correct answer in one month time.

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Posted in Google Analytics

Tags: ga Google Analytics google analytics quiz

Uncover Hidden Leads with Google Analytics

January 6th, 2010

The following article is describing one of the best lead generation tips for B2B websites, with the help of Google Analytics. Please note that this is an advanced technique involving creating profiles, custom filters, custom reporting and the use of advanced filters. You should be familiar with all of them, before you start implementing it.

I will share how you can uncover those leads who are coming to your website but are not submitting their contact details (sign up for a white paper, inquire about your products, etc). I am calling these hidden leads which are prospecting the market, the hot leads, or hidden leads/missed leads. Intrigued already?

You should go even further. Once you’ve identified that someone from a certain company came to your website searching for a particular keyword (usually you can associate keywords with your services/products), do you job and get a contact name from that company, pick up the phone and start selling hard by asking if, by chance ;), they need the services you’re selling. Some of them will be amazed how you’ve found them, some will be upset, but you’ll be happy with the results.

Using GA profiles, filters and custom reporting you will:

be able to identify the company the lead came from, even if he didn’t submit his contact details
discover the service that “mystery shopper” is interested in
call and ask is he is interested in my services (the cherry on the cake!)

Your website is converting at a low 1-5% and you’re paying big bucks to drive quality traffic to your website, with your SEO, PPC or banner campaigns. Some of the organic traffic will not be relevant since search engines may rank your website for strange search phrases. But what about the traffic coming from you highly targeted, core keywords like your service/product name (i.e. hospital management software)? What is happening with those 95 out of 100 people coming on your website and not contacting you? Who are they?

This tip uses, one of the probably least used GA report, network location. You can find it under Visitors–>Network Properties –>Network Location

Step 1

Create a new profile for your GA account, since you are going to filter data and you don’t want to alter the original data.

Step 2

Add the following custom filters to the newly created profile:

Filter 1: Since I am targeting only leads from North America, I will include only traffic from Canada and US

Include only North American Traffic

Filter 2: Exclude some generic words used the most by common ISPs

Exclude Generic Words used by ISP Organizations

You can you can add more filter words (use “|” as OR delimiter) by analyzing your Network Location report and searching for the organization name to check it it’s an ISP or not

Filter 3: Exclude specific ISP names from your reports

Exclude ISPs Names

Again, you can and should add more filter words (use “|” as delimiter) by analyzing your Network Location report and identifying local ISPs.

If the ISP list is bigger than Google’s filter pattern limit of 1024 chars (and it will) you will need to add other filters with the same settings as filter #3, only that the filter pattern will be different.

Step 2

Create a custom report with the following settings

Then apply the report and have fun and with data. Each keyword will tell you the kind of service the hot lead is interested in. If you have too many unrelated keywords in the report use the advanced filters at the bottom of each report table, to look at specific keywords only:

Advanced Filter to Include only certain Keywords

Step 4

Once you identified the company name and the services (keywords) they are interested in, create a free Jigsaw (or other sources ou use to get business contacts data) account and search for the marketing manager of that company.

Jigsaw.com

Step 5

Call the guy and ask his is he is not (by chance) interesting in the targeted service ;)

Note: there are services out there selling similar services in the $2500+ per year, which I would recommend you to buy if you can, but I thought you might enjoy some food for the brain (of which Google Analytics is providing more than enough)

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Posted in Competitive Intelligence, Conversion Optimization, Google Analytics

Tags: hidden leads hot leads missed leads recovery

Use Google Analytics to Negotiate Your Salary

January 1st, 2010

If you deserve a salary increase use the following tip for better chances of getting that raise. The tip assumes that you have access to your company’s GA account and you did a good job (the numbers you’re responsible are going up (i.e. visits) or down (i.e.bounce rate).

Let’s say you’re the SEO guy and you’ve been hired in May 2009 to increase the organic traffic or rankings. First, you should associate a monetary value to the traffic source you’ve been responsible with and then get the numbers ready for the salary negotiating meeting; usually your boss will look at revenue or profit. If you are taking care of an ecommerce website, you can use the following GA report to measure the impact of your work on your company’s revenue: traffic sources –> search engines –> ecommerce tab on the revenue column:

SEO impact on revenue

Compare two date ranges, May 1^st 2008 to Dec 31^st 2008 with May 1^st 2009 to Dec 30^st 2009. The revenue difference between these two time intervals will be your upper card.

Too bad that for this website the commerce tracking was not properly installed, so there won’t be a delta for the revenue values. However, you can use the columns visits and the per visit value to approximate the SEO impact:

Your delta will be 48.85% (47k visitors) – wow nice job, you should get a bonus too – which, at $5.05 per visit value, translates into $244k additional revenue generated by SEO. Now you have the upper cards!

If you’re responsible with the SEO of non-transactional website, then you should tie your organic traffic with the goal(s) of the website (lead sign ups, downloads, time on site, etc) and associate a monetary value with the goal(s). If the difference is positive, it’s time for you to negotiate!

Good luck in 2010!

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Posted in Google Analytics, Others

Tags: Google Analytics salary negotiation

Visits to Goal Report in Google Analytics

December 28th, 2009

If you have eCommerce enabled in your Google Analytics, you can take the advantages of an useful report in the eCommerce section – the Visits to Purchase report. However, if you run a non eCommerce site (a non transactional website), there is no such report as Visits to Goal, thou it may be useful.

Here’s how to configure a custom report that can help you with that:

Google Analytics - Visits to Goal Custom Report

A sample of what is producing:

Another useful report will be Days to Purchase, but Google Analytics doesn’t provide such a dimension/metric as Day Since First Visit to play with

Notice:

keep in mind that Google haven’t yet changed the dimensions and the metrics to accommodate the newly added types of goals (I only see dimensions only for goals 1 to 4 while now you can have up to 20 goals)
if you set up more than one goal you may see conversion rates like 200%
this report is just an workaround this issue and I do not expect it to be 100% accurate

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Posted in Google Analytics

Tags: Google Analytics visits to goals

Google Analytics Hack – More Columns for Pivot Tables

November 18th, 2009

This is an advanced hack for Google Analytics. However, this won’t help you hack into your competitors’ accounts ;), but will help you export more data from Google Analytics’ pivoted tables.

This is not the same hack as the exporting more than 500 columns of data from any report. That one was one of the most annoying things I’ve fixed (to be read hacked) long time back.

You’ll need:

- Firefox

- Live HTTP header (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/)

What are we hacking?

We’ll make possible for the analyst in you to download more than 5 columns from Google Analytics’ Pivot Table reports. Warning: it may cause head bleeding from too much banging against the wall when you’ll analyze more analytics data :).

Usually, when you download pivot tables, you will be able to download only 5 columns (pivot by landing pages – only 5 in the example below:

Only 5 Columns in Pivot Tables

Ok, let’s start:

Go to any report that has the pivot table option and segment the data the way you want to analyze it (for testing purposes you can use the example above: go on Traffic Sources report à then Referring Sites and then pivot by Landing Page and choose Showing Visits)
Start Live HTTP header (in Firefox, under Tools) – do not load any other pages between step 2 and 3
Make sure you checked the Capture box on live HTTP header
Go back to your Google Analytics window and select a new number of page rows on, under Show rows (the footer of the pivot table). At this moment, the table should reload – tricky, the URL didn’t change ;)
Open the Live HTTP header window
The first line there should be the request sent to Google Analytics in order to reload the pivot table. You should see something similar to
Live HTTP Header
Copy the link (should be the first if you didn’t load any other page or made other HTTP request – music or video streams) and load it in another tab. You should have something similar to:
Pure html table
Now look for the &tcols=5 parameter. Change it to &tcols=50 and load the new URL
Here you go, 50 columns:
50 Columns In Pivot Tables

Nice. This data is what you need, to make your life even more miserable, but now this is not enough for you. You want to have this exported in Excel.

Here’s a bonus hack for Google Analytics – I feel like today you should buy me a coffee, buddy.

The URL that exports Google Analytics reports in CSV for Excel (&fmt=5) is:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5 and some parameters after.

You will have to copy everything starting and including &id=…. from the URL you previously modified (the one with &tcols=50) and append it to Google’s export URL. The export URL will look like:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5&id=1234567&esig=4&seg0=-8&pdr=20091016-20091115&cmp=visit_segments&trows=25&rpt=ReferringSourcesReport&seg=1&view=4&tchcol=0&tst=0&segkey=source&afs=false&eid=TableChanged&tab=0&tcst=0&tpivk=request_uri_1&tcols=50

Exported Pivot Columns

Now, go back and start trying to do the same. And if this is not enough I will try to publish a video tutorial – later this week/month/year, depending on how busy my clients will keep me.