As one of the more regular topics on this blog will be highlighting some key metrics that every web advertising campaign and web site owner needs to pay attention to, and how they relate to online campaigns in China in particular. These will go in no particular order, but I plan to cover the ones I see as most critical for China first.
The first candidate is the "Bounce Rate". The Web Analytics Association defines Bounce Rate as Single page view visits / Entry Pages . A more common definition used by most analytics tools is: Single Page Visits / Entry Pages. It measures how many of the visits that used a page as the entry page to your site, were single page visits. Or in marketers terms: Is your landing page interesting enough for users to take action (clicking links on the page).
Now why is this so important for online campaigns? In traditional media advertising, we analyze TV ratings, media circulation and other metrics to understand how many people have been exposed to our AD. Then we do surveys to understand if the AD broke though the media noise and how it affected the audience's attitude.  Most of the time, this is exactly what we advertisers in China are doing for online advertising campaigns as well. We measure the impressions recorded on the page the AD was displayed, then measure the clicks and click through rates on the banner (or search keyword in too few cases) to measure the "break through" of the AD, and then we survey the audience about brand preference etc. What is often ("most of the time" in China) completely ignored, is what happens after the users clicked on the banner! Since this is what makes web advertising so unique and in my opinion uniquely valuable, this is a complete and utter waste. Once a visitor clicked on our ad, we know that he is interested in our message. Even better, after the click he comes to an environment that we have 100% control of. This is the place where we can really impact the visitors/users/potential clients perception of our brand, increase his brand awareness, increase his brand preference of even let them buy our product / service directly.
The bounce rate tells you how well you have made use of that opportunity. How well you have used the web to do more that just show users pretty ads through a new channel. The answer is, that in China, at the moment, sadly, we are doing very badly. My discussion with clients, friend and industry experts suggest that bounce rates for online campaigns in China hover between 90 and 99% percent, with good campaigns coming closer to 90 but only rarely below. Comparisons show that the average bounce rate is closer to 60% in the US (in lieu of other data points). It means that, of the 6-7 billion RMB spend on online advertising in China in 2007, more than 5.5 billion fail to use the online channel effectively. In other words: If we come close to the US numbers, we can improve our online advertising effectiveness but at least 300%.
This is certainly a number to think about. Even though there are several factor that might help to explain parts of this outrageous number,

• Many netizens in China might not be able to differentiate well between content they are interested in or all relevant content is already available in. 



• the landing page might contain all the info the visitor is interested in, and he/she does not need to click further



• Sometimes visit where the visitor only clicked on a download link counted as bounces

it is critical for every advertiser to understand what their bounce rate is, how it relates to their campaign goals and to the bounce rate of competitor's campaigns. So here is a question to my readers (the one or two who might read this), what is your bounce rate, and what do you go about reducing it?