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If you have any connection with web analytics then, I am sure, you have heard about the bounce rates  (see Bounce Rate Demystified and Typical Bounce Rates ). A lot of analysts and a few web analytics tools are obsessed with the bounce rates. High bounce rate is considered bad . If you are one of those who is obsessed with the bounce rate or think that all that bounces is bad then this blog post is for you. This post was originally published on 10/28/2009.  After 9 years of writing this post, I still get questions about Bounce rate that are answered in this post so I am updating to make this post live again. I do believe that bounce rate is a great starting metrics when you are trying to optimize your site but be careful and make sure that you are measuring the true bounce rate. Below are the three factors that lead to the misreporting of the bounce rates Links to external sites - Many sites have links to the external sites such as sponsors, micro sites etc. Consid...

Bounce Rate is generally defined as single page visits. These are the visits that leave the site without going any further than the landing page.  A very common approach to landing page analysis is to start with Bounce Rate and see if it is a problem before diving deeper into the page/site. However, the number that your tool is providing you might be wrong. Relying blindly on the number provide by your Web Analytics tool might lead you into the wrong direction. Below are 4 reasons why your Bounce Rate might be wrong In Page Actions – If you have certain actions, such as video plays or windows that popup with JavaScript then the chances are that you are not tracking them as valid site interactions. In this case, even though the visitors will take one of the desired actions i.e. watch the video or click on a link to launch the popup window to fill a form etc., your Web Analytics tool will count these visits as single page visit, thus inflating your Bounce Rate. Extern...

This morning I read a blog post titled " How Topeka Capitalized On Google's April Fools' Joke" . In my opinion the only company that capitalized on this was Google not Topeka Tourism Board . There were three big mistakes Topeka made in trying to cash in on the Google’s April fools prank. Hopefully, they did not lose a lot of money on this campaign and generated some awareness of Topeka. At least they got free placement on my blog. There are three lessons to be learned from their mistakes: Determine the goals of your paid search - What is the purpose of your Paid Search Campaign? Make sure you are not attracting a lot of unqualified clicks. In this case the purpose of buying paid search was not clear. Just because a high volume on a keyword was happening does not mean all that traffic is qualified for your business. Define KPIs before you start spending money - Figure out how you will measure success. In this case they did not have any way to measure success. They...

Most likely, you have all heard that high bounce rates are bad. Some people even believe that bounce rate affects your sites search engine rankings. Meaning higher bounce rate is bad for your organic rankings. I am not sure if that actually is true or not but it does show you that most analysts consider high bounce rates as a negative indicator of a site’s health. Are high bounce rates really bad? Generally they are but you have to consider the other factors and put everything in context before you can come to that conclusion. In my post “All that bounces is not Bad” , I showed you that there are cases when the bounces are not really bad. One of the causes of high bounce rate is the entry via “destination page”. A destination page is a page that provides the information that the visitors are looking for. Destination pages are going to have higher bounce rate and no matter how hard you try you might not be able to move the needle on those pages. For this reason, most of the news sites, ...

There has been a lag in my blog posting lately, and it’s gone on longer than I like. Lately, things have been hectic at work leaving very little time for blogging. Any time left has been consumed the following activities: Working on my Site, AnilBatra.com Ask an expert – I started a section for you to ask questions on Web Analytics, Behavioral Targeting and Web Analytics tools, particularly Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics. The questions will be answered by one of the people who have volunteered, one of my team members at Ascentium or me personally. So if you have a question please go ahead and fill out the form and someone will get back to you within 48 hours. If you would like to be one of the experts please email me a brief description about your skills and experience. Twitter – Google Analytics URL Builder – Nothing fancy here but a tool that allows you to create short URLs that you can post in Twitter and track them in your Google Analytics. It allows you to create short...

Visitors go to search engines because they are looking for something. They enter their search query and want the search engine to provide relevant results. Marketers buy Paid Search listings because they want to cash in on visitors searches by providing relevant product/services/offers etc. Remember, users are looking for results and not another set of search boxes or additional navigation to get to what they want. It is marketers’ responsibility to make sure the offers shown on their landing pages are relevant to the search keyword that the user searched for. DON’T make the visitors search again. Provide the user with relevant results right away. Don’t make people click more buttons or links to find what they are looking for. You are wasting your money if you are doing PPC without thinking about the experience visitors will get once they click on the ad and land on your site. Landing pages are very critical to the success of any kind of advertising, but are even more critical in searc...