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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...

Web Analytics and Digital Analytics are quite often used interchangeably.  I have been asked, by my students and some clients, about the difference in these two, so I decided to write this short post to clarify the terms. As you can see from the Google Trends graph, Google searches for “Digital Analytics” were nonexistent till Web Analytics Association changed its name to Digital Analytics Association. Since then the term "Digital Analytics" has started to pick up. In early days of internet, companies started to analyze website data such as users, visitors, visits, page views etc. and the term used to describe this analysis was called “ Web Analytics ”. Then came other forms of online (digital channels) such as email, search, social, mobile etc. and increasingly Digital Analytics folks were including this data and analysis of all these channels to provide a complete view of the “Digital” channels, marketing and customers. To fully include the scope of work of “Web Analysts” ...

Do you understand the mechanism of Web Analytics? Do you understand how data is collected and translated into the nice reports that you see in Google Analytics, WebTrends, Adobe etc.? Now you can. Signup for my online course  - "Web Analytics Under the Hood". This Online course will go under the hood and show you how the data gets generated, collected and processed to generate beautiful reports that you see in your Web Analytics tools. Having a good understanding of what happens behind the scene will provide you the confidence you need to support your understanding of the reports and provide a fresh new perspective on Web Analytics reports. This course will be helpful for both newcomers as well as seasoned professionals. I will cover topics that I ask in interviews while hiring a web analyst. This course will help you: Understand how browser/server communication happens. Understand how data gets passed to server. Understand how data is collected ( Javascript, server logs) - ...

Let’s face it, Web Analytics data is pretty limited when it comes to visitor analysis .  Many of you might have some data on users who have registered or purchased from you and some of you might be connecting the onsite activity of visitors with the other data you have in your database. However, considering that you have less than 10% conversion rate (or registration rate) there are over 90% of the visitors on your site that you have no information on. Image Source: imnmarketer.com This is where 3rd party data providers come to your rescue. These data providers can provide a lot of valuable missing data and bridge the gap. Companies like BlueKai and iBehavior can augment anonymous cookie pool or known customer base with additional attributes that you don’t have. For example, say you have a segment called “Engaged Users” that is all based on anonymous cookies visiting your site and taking certain actions e.g. downloading a whitepaper.   Since it is all cookie b...

I rarely write tool specific posts on this blog but since I have recently been asked by a few people about this issue and it affects every web analytics tool, I decided to post it here. A few months ago, Google, the search engine, started encrypting searches for user who are logged into their Google account while conducting the search. As a result of this encryption, the keyword that the visitors search to arrive to your site is not passed in the referring URL. Web Analytics tools rely on the keywords passed in the referring URL to build the search engine traffic report and in the absence of the keywords there is nothing to report, though they still see that the visits came from Google search. So Google Analytics now marks those visits that do not have a keyword but come from Google with “(not provided)” keyword instead of the actual keyword . Finding those keywords Google still tracks all the keywords search by logged in users but just does not pass it in the referrer to the site that...

Web Analytics tools are great for providing a good view of one channel i.e. your website (ok, maybe slightly more than one channel e.g. some email, some social media, some offline). They worked great in silo for first few years of the internet because the only way for customers to interact with your brand online was on your site and websites were not an integral part of the business. Nowadays the story is different, customers interact with your brand in so many way, your website is just one small part of the whole "web" ecosystem and "web" is just one part of the whole "customer" experience and buying cycle ecosystem. Customer’s don’t think and operate in one channel i.e. your website. However, many "web analytics" tools do not even provide you full view of a customer journey and interactions online let alone the offline journey. To understand today's customer and performance of your marketing efforts, web analytics data has to move out of it...

This is part II of the series on Analyzing and Optimizing Campaigns . I wrote in my previous post that when analyzing campaigns many web analysts just focus on the web analytics data. Some venture to include the cost and impression data of the campaign but they still don’t have a complete view. In this post I will show you how their lack of complete view results in wrong analysis and wrong conclusions. Below is the data I used in my last post. This is the type of data most Web Analytics tools provide and hence “Web Analysts” tend to use. What is missing? Where is the cost of products and profit margin data? Without that information, you don’t know if this campaign is successful or not. Right? The sad reality is that many web analysts don’t have access to profit margin data and hence they look at what is available to them and start recommending A/B testing (see my post One Awesome Web Analytics Tip: Think Beyond Web Analytics ). And their first target generally is Bounce Rate. Oh… ...

I am going to start this series of post with few questions for you.  Here is some data pulled from a Web Analytics tool. This data is for a “Display Ad” campaign: Most of the web analysts today get the following view of display advertising from their Web Analytics tool.  Looking at this data and some publicly available information they will get started on the analysis and recommendation. Though some other analysts will say, Wait… I need more information.  Google Adwords has done such a great job in providing cost data and almost all of the analysts have dealt with some kind of paid search campaign, so they know that cost of campaign plays a role in the analysis of campaign.  So they demand it.  Well this is where most of the web analytics tools fell short, cost data generally resides in some other tool and it is not easy to get that data. But how said that Analytics was easy.   However, I am providing full data with cost so that we can continue with this po...

I am sure you have heard of a story about a guy lost his ring in a dark alley. It was really dark and he could not see anything, so he went to a nearby lamppost and started searching for his ring underneath it. When asked why he was looking for ring under the lamppost, he said “because it is bright here”. That’s what most of the web analyst do. Even when the problem might exist somewhere other than what their web analytics data can show majority of the web analytics folks just look at “Web Data” for the answers. Why? Because that’s all the data they have easy access too. It is brighter there. Here are some other things which are in the “dark” areas. It is time for you to shine light on them: Ad Server – There are several factors that impact a performance of a campaign, many of them don’t show up in your web analytics tools, they reside within ad servers or with 3rd parties. Example: Which pages the ads was shown, what time was the ad shown etc. I will write more on this in a future ...

Real-time web analytics provides you a view into what is happening on your site at that very moment. It is really interesting to see where visitors are coming from, what keywords they are searching, what pages they are viewing etc. Though most of the time that’s where it ends i.e. it is interesting but not very valuable. As many web analysts have stated time and again, the value of the analytics comes from the action you take on that data. So, unless you are going to take actions in real time you really don’t need real-time analytics. However, I can understand the temptation to use Real Time Analytics for instant gratification. Side Bar: Recently Google Analytics joined the bandwagon of providing Real-Time analytics. Other notable real time web analytics vendors include Chartbeat, Woopra. As of now, Google analytics only provides a very limited view of real time stats at this point, though I am assuming that it is just the beginning and Google will roll out more stats in its real tim...

QR codes have started to pop-up in lot of places such as store display, business cards, online ads, postcards etc. Whether QR codes are here to stay or not but from the measurement perspective they do present a huge opportunity in measuring advertising's (particularly offline) effectiveness. If you are one of those marketers who have embraced QR code or are thinking about it or just curious to know how QR code measurement works then this post is for you. Measuring URLs in QR Codes You won’t be able to measure the number of impressions of the QR codes if they are distributed offline. What you can measure is how much traffic those QR codes are driving to your site or to your pages on 3rd party sites like facebook page, twitter account etc. Measuring QR code links to your site Measuring QR codes that sends user to your site is as simple as campaign tracking. Just add the campaign tracking variable to the URLs that you have in your QR Codes and treat it like any other campaign. ...

Continuing my series on Creating a Culture of Analytics I would like to touch on a very critical aspect of creating a culture of Web Analytics and that is Context. What is Context According to Princeton.edu context is Discourse that surrounds a language unit and helps to determine its interpretation the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event Context takes the ambiguity out of the equation. As an Analyst it is very important that you provide full context when reporting your web analytics data. Context gets everybody on the same page. Do not leave anything for interpretation by the end users of your reports, give them the insights in a simple and easy to understand format . Let’s look at an example to understand critical context is. 60 Degrees If I say it is going to be 60 degrees tomorrow. What will be you reaction? If you are in Minnesota – You will yell “Summer” If you are in Seattle, you will think – ““Spring” If you are in Florida, you will say “ Damn… Co...

Presenting the data is what Web Analysts do majority of the time. It is critical for Web Analysts to present the data in a way that is easily understood by their intended audience. However, I have seen time and again that this simple rule is missed. Why? Because we all suffer from what is known as "The Curse of Knowledge". What is The Curse of Knowledge? Here is what 37Signals.com write on this subject: Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise. "Curse of Knowledge" becomes a big issue for Web Analysts and Managers who are trying ...

All those who have worked at companies which never used or do not use web analytics to make decisions about site changes, know how difficult it is to create a culture of web analytics. It is very hard. Building a culture of web analytics is a grueling uphill task. After working with various client I have found that reasons for not using web analytics vary from company to company, some of the common ones are: Gut feel has always worked or at least it seems like it has worked It is an additional step in the process New skills are required to use web analytics. They feel they don’t have the required skills for using web analytics Fear of accountability i.e. now I will be measured and I don’t like that The reports that they got in past were pretty useless They didn’t believe in web analytics data because they have no clue on how the data was collected They don’t understand how web analytics can help them They don’t understand what web analytics is The first reaction of many newly hired ana...

HiPPO is an overly used in the web analytics community to make the web analysts feel good. But this term, in my opinion, does more harm than good to you. Though I meant to write this post a long time ago, today a post by Steve Jackson - HiPPO could be your best friend finally prompted me to write it. For those how don’t know, HiPPO is a term used to describe the opinion of the Highest Paid Person (HiPP) i.e. Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. This terms basically says that the person who gets paid the most (it assumes that this person is also the highest authority position) will make decisions that are not based on any facts but rather based on his/her gut feel. As a result his/her opinions are generally wrong. Really? Do you really think that they got into their position by giving wrong opinions? Some experts even encourage analysts to publicly embarrass HIPPOs by proving them wrong? Really? How do you think it is going to help you? Will you have a job tomorrow? As an analyst, your...

In a recent article on Ad Age, I came across an interesting article around increasing importance and emphasis on Dashboards. I always thought that Dashboards are native to analytics and that it ought to be adopted by everyone organizations by now. Aren’t discussion around Dashboard as old (even older) than Web/Multi channel analytics. After reading the Ad Age article along with my experience with clients I have come across an increasing need by clients to PROVE the effectiveness and efficiency of ad spend. Presently, marketing executives appear to be singularly focussed on ROI. The question we ask ourselves is that is it the holy grail of all measures? Should we move away from ROI as a single measurement of performance and add other factors to provide a (more) comprehensive view or a meaningful picture of marketing effectiveness? If so how do we share or present this data? When we ask these questions the importance of Dashboards and Scorecards become increasingly relevant and important...