Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Bounce Baby Bounce (Source: Wikipedia

When I first started to learn the ropes of web analytics, I turned to Avinash Kaushik’s blog (Occam’s Razor) and book (Web Analytic’s: One hour a day) for a great deal of insight and actionable advice. One thing that stuck with me early, was Avinash’s emphasis on Bounce Rate as “The sexiest metric ever“. With all the caveats of generalizing metrics across different websites, bounce rate analysis is still a great place to start, when you plan to optimize your website.

Many companies and analyst have followed Avinash’s lead and are now prioritizing the reporting of Bounce Rate metrics. Talking to many clients in China I noticed a common question on everyone’s lips, tough: “My bounce rate sucks. What can I do?“.

Over time I developed a standard approach to address this question. Take a look at my 5 step guide:

Step 1: Does your bounce rate really suck? (Benchmarking)

Good or not? (Source: http://etc.usf.edu/)

In order to understand if you need to take immediate action to improve your bounce rate (as opposed to focusing on other KPIs), it is critical to benchmark your site’s performance.

Since user behavior and web design varies greatly among cultures, it is critical to find relevant local benchmarks for your site, ideally in your industry. In the US, services like compete.com provide valueable data. In China we have to do without any reliable 3rd party benchmark (what a shame). Even Google Analytic’s Benchmark function is not relevant, since it compares sites by industy, but does not provide country specific numbers.

A rule of thumb based on my experience in China (and please leave your ideas in the comments segment):

1. For micro sites for branding campaigns with mainly banner traffic: 85% to 90%
2. For landing pages of search marketing campaigns 25% to 40%
3. For landing pages of targeted direct marketing campaigns (20% – 30%)

If your numbers are higher, your bounce rate really sucks and you do need to take immediate action.

There are 4 common drivers for bounce rate.

Bounce Rate Causes

Lets take a look at each of them.

Step 2: Landing page segmentation

Bounce Rate is calculated by dividing the number of single page visits  to a page (bounces) by the number of overall entires (visits that started on this page) to that same page. Bounces can only occur on landing pages (the first page a visitor sees on a visit to your site). So when your overall site shows a high bounce rate, you should first look at which landing page contributes most to your overall site bounce rate.

The most effective way to do that, is to calcualate the weighted bounce rate of all your landing pages. Stephane Hamel wrote the defining post about the methodology in 2007 on his Immeria blog. In effect you calculate the impact the bounce rate of each landing page has on the overall site bounce rate, by weighing it according to each pages importance (measured by the number of page views).

Use this formula

Bounce Rate * (Page Views/Total Page Views).

to calculate the Weighted Bounce rate of each landing page.

Take Action: Focus further analysis and optimization efforts on the landing pages with the highest weighted bounce rate. Check if your problem landing page is implementing best practices, usability test it, make changes, then A/B test the new version vs. the old version.

Step 3: Traffic Source Segmentation

Another driver for a high bounce rate on your site is low traffic quality. If your advertising efforts drive visitors to your site that are not interested in what your site has to offer, the best landing page cannot convert them. So before to start getting all excited about remodeling the landing experience, take a look at the traffic sources for your problem landing page. Many web analytics tools (regrettably not Omniture) allow you to easily segment your bounce rate by traffic source and / or type of traffic.

Bounce Rate by traffic source in Google Analytics

When doing this segmentation, look out for high volume traffic sources that drive traffic with a very high bounce rate. Very high is relative and a good benchmark is usually the bounce rate of your direct and search traffic. Visitors from these sources are usually highly targeted. If their bounce rate is high, your landing page likely has a problem. If these traffic sources have a low bounce rate whereas others, especially banner ads, partnership links etc have a very high bounce rate, don’t change your site, change your (paid) traffic sources.

Step 4: Creative Segmentation

When seeing high bounce rates for banners or SEM campaigns, it makes sense to dig one level deeper. Often these campaigns run with multiple creative executions of the banner or multiple copy executions for the text ad. Sometimes that creates a situation where one banner’s creative or call to action or one text ad is not relevant to offer made in the landing page. That is turn leads to a high bounce rate.

To understand if that happened to your campaign, you first need to make sure that your banners and text ads are comprehensively tagged (Google Analytics: UTM _content; Omniture SAINT tags) to differentiate between different creative versions. In the next step, A/B test your various creative version in multiple spots, to measure which one leads to the higher bounce rate.

Action: Run a creative A/B test before launching a campaign to ensure maximum performance.

Step 5: Loading time (Geo Segmentation)

Another very important factor for bounce rate performance is the loading time of your landing page. Especially rich landing experiences (often Flash based) require the download of large amount of data before they are ready for consumption. The longer visitors have to wait before the experience begins, the more likely they are to bounce. So far so easy.

The key challenge for web analysts is that loading time data is not available in any  web analytics tool. In order to get reliable data, you need to buy the services of companies like Gomez, who specialize in web performance measurement (see last weeks Web Analytics Wednesday). This data is especially important in China, where loading times can vary widely across provinces and cities due to a unique network layout (see ChinaNetCloud’s presentation on SlideShare).

A good indicator for loading time challenges is a large variation of bounce rates across provinces in China. In order to get Google Analytics to show you the bounce rate by province in China, go to the map overlay report and click on China. This will go directly to the “by city” breakdown. Then go to the URL bar of your browser and replace the term “city” with the term “region” (** here magic happens **).

Bounce Rate by Province (China)

Action: If you see a large variation (especially between northern and southern provinces) you have a good indicator that your need to improve your hosting infrastructure to address your bounce rate problems.

These are my five steps. What are yours? Did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments.

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Attention: Location Change: This month we are back at Luga’s Villa.
Speaker: Yuan Cheng,程渊, GM of Gomez China

Topic: Introducing “performance” in web “performance” analytics

Please join me and 40 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet cool people and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well to.

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening if you register in advance, and RMB 100 if you visit us without registration. As usual, the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable.

Address:
Luga’s Villa (details and map)
7 Sanlitun North Street, Sanlitun
Right behind 3.3 Plaza
三六屯北里7号楼
3.3 大厦后边
Phone: 135-2013-7915

Schedule:
19:45 – Door open / Buffet open
20:15 – 20:45 Presentation
20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session
21:00 – 22:00 Networking

I am looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday August 5th.

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• Internet Marketing for Beginners. Interesting Points to Bear in Mind (raunchyjohnson.com)

For those of you who couldn’t join yesterday’s Adworld 2009 event, please find the presentations of the Web Analytics session attached. Regular readers of this blog will have seen my 10 Rules for Winning through Analytics presentation already.

Among the other three  decks I want to highlight the “Measurement and optimizations at Qunar” presentation Charlene Ng gave. Qunar is one of the leading travel portals and the leading travel search engine in China. They have presented atthe June WAW but the current deck is more detailed and provides a much better understanding about how they do analytics.

Thanks again to DCCI for hosting this event and of course for all the Speakers & Sidney Song (OMD) – as the moderator

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Attention: Location Change: Now at Club Obiwan (Haidian), Next month back at Luga’s Villa.

Speaker: Mike Pereira, COO at Sinotech Media (TBC)

Topic: Web Analyics Getting Social in China

Please join me and 40 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet other web analytics enthusiasts and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well to.

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening if you register in advance, and RMB 100 if you visit us without registration. As usual, the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable.

Address:
Club Obiwan (Description and Map)
西城区西海西沿4号 离积水潭地铁站300米
Xihai Xiyan No.4, Xicheng district, 300m from Jishuitan subway station

Phone (for directions): 010 8322 1231

Schedule:
19:45 – Door open / Buffet open
20:15 – 20:45 Presentation
20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session
21:00 – 22:00 Networking

I am looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday July 1st

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• Measuring Social Media at Web Analytics Wednesday (n0d3.org)

Yesterday I had the opportunity to share some of my thought on web analytics with the geeks on a plane guys.  The most impressive part? They had a specific section called “startup metrics” . This fact alone is prove enough that these guys get it.

If you need more prove, please check out Dave McClure’s Startup metrics for pirates presentation that he reanimated for this event.

I had only 15 minutes to speak, so I made it short and sweet. Check out the presentation below and let me know what you think about it. Of course I liberally borrow from Avinash and Stephane Hamel. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

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During yesterday’s May Web Analytics Wednesday I had the chance to share my thoughts about Testing and why it has to be at the core of digital optimization and innovation.  Please see the deck I shared with the crowed on Slideshare.

In my post on “Landing Page Optimization” in early 2008 I have made a point that is still almost unanimously ignored in developing websites in China.

 The most effective way to an optimized landing page is testing,
but testing itself comes as one part of part of an
effective optimization process.”

I took  this opportunity to reprise this post in a presentation. My objective was to help all attendees to take a fresh look at their web analytics and optimization process and come away with new ideas on how to make it work better. Take a look at the slides and let me know how it worked. The comments are open. Let the fun begin.

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Daqi Logo

As a web analysts, we try to understand and optimize the performance of our or our clients’ websites and digital campaigns. For the most part that has included media optimization, creative opmtimization and site optimization. In a Web 2.0 world that is not enough anymore. As brands realize that they share the ownership of their brand image with their customers, prospects  and other interested parties online, (who influence each other by sharing their impressions, opinions and feedback trough ever increasing social media channels), brands are asking us to help them make sense of the discussion happening about their brand online a s well.

Zhou Lei will introduce Daqi’s tools and services that enable brands and agencies to keep track of the  ever proliferating online discussion. She will share some examples from auto/IT/FMCG case studies and describe  Daqi’s methodology. A quick intro to their service:

Daqi’s Buzz Radar system monitors 700,000+ BBS and 10 blog service providers in China. We capture av. 500,000+ data points from social media sites every day. From 2004 to now, our database has 8000+ million data entries. Based on the primary data from social media, we provide market intelligence, ads/campaign tracking, industry analysis, online behavior analysis, social media analysis,  IWOM analysis reports for our clients.

Please join Zhou Lei, me and more than 30 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet other web enthusiasts and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well to:

Location: Luga’s Villa (right behind 3.3 in Sanlitun)

Time and date: Wednesday April 1st , 8PM

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening. As usual the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable

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• March Web Analytics Wednesday Beijing with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)
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With a record turnout of 60 attendees for last nights Beijing Web Analytics Wednesday (more details about that, including video!! to follow), we are setting our sights to spreading the WAW goodness to other digital hubs in China. Next stop Shanghai.

We have money:

Local Sponsor: Elliot Ng
Global Sponsor 1: Coremetrics	Global Sponsor 2: Sitespect

We have attendees:

Multiple comment and emails on my and Song Xings blog (Chinese) and in out Inboxes  have asked us about Shanghai events.

What we don’t have is someone who stands up and organizes it.

- Is that you? -

If you are interested, please get in touch with me. I am happy to share my experience and advice. Its not rocket science, it doesn’t take much time nor any money. But its very rewarding, seeing the community grow month by month. Sweet deal, right? So what are you waiting for? Shoot me an email florianpihs[at]gmail[dot]com or leave a comment to this post.

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While many of my readers probably already know the Yahoo! Web Analytics Forum: For those who don’t, I highly recommend you become a member and subscribe to the updates. There is no better way to keep yourself updated about the hot topics in the Web Analytics arena (while sometime the email updates stack up quite a bit in my Inbox….)

Currently a hot discussion is ranging on the benefits and implementation of the Web Analytics Association’s Web Analytics Standards (PDF).

1. Brandt Dainow started the discussion off on iMedia Connection claiming: “What the WAA has done is a retrograde step — the WAA standard has less precision and utility than the JICWEBS standards, so it moves us backward not forward. However, WAA is a major force in the world of web analytics and online marketing. What it says matters. In this light, the work of the WAA standards committee is a disaster for the web analytics community. It will take years to undo the damage and create proper precise standards that can be implemented in software. The WAA “standard” is not a standard, it’s just second-rate muttering.”
2. Stephane Hamel replied on his blog, highlighting the differences between an industry standard and a “standard terminology”, arguing that the Web Analytic’s Association’s value is coming from creating a consensus among the different actors in the market.
   The ISO is a standard body, and in order to claim ISO certification you need to abide by strict rules, and pay undergo audits to retain certification. On the other end, the IAB is a more open structure, much more similar to the WAA, that was able to define common terminology regarding online advertising and bring “standards, guidelines and best practices”. On the other end, the IAB is a more open structure, much more similar to the WAA, that was able to define common terminology regarding online advertising and bring “standards, guidelines and best practices.” Which one makes most sense? Which one makes most sense? In my mind, the second option is the way to go! In my mind, the second option is the way to go!
3. Many other post in the thread, but I like the reply from Angie Brown, co-chair of the commitee (extra points for staying calm, too).
   There are several reasons the definitions are written the way they are, and why we left some wiggle room in them (too much, in some people’s opinion and that’s fair enough). First, there’s the intended audience. Stephane hit the nail on the head when he said we used marketing rather than engineering terms. Web analytics is a business function, and we tried to write the definitions (yes, definitions, not technical standards — for now) in such a way that they would be accessible to most marketers.

Check the whole this out. Which argument do you agree with? Let me know in the comments

I am just returning from today’s AdWorld 2009 event in Beijing and am happy to report that all three keynotes (Jeremy Fain of IAB US, David Ketchum of ADMA and Will Hodgman of Comscore) were focussing on data & standards or had some interesting related comments.

Jeremy gave and introduction on “The Importance of Standards in Growing the  Interactive Advertising Market”, and Will repeated a disappointing standard Comscore deck without any China data (that takes guts in the market with the largest online population)

The “on the money” comment came from David Ketchum. “2009 is not going to be the year of data and standards”. David’s conversations with the largest publishers align closely with my observations, that big publishers in China are still very comfortable making money from a lack of transparency. They are very interested in talking to the ADMA or IAB, but still feel like they have something to loose in a more standardized and transparent ad-world. The key drivers for change towards more transparency have to be advertisers and smaller publishers who do business by proving their performance through independently verified superior performance.

I see this already happening, but it takes time to build momentum. 2009 will be a good start but it will take time until well into the new decade until we can say goodbye to cost per day media buys, ad serving by publishers and hundreds of different banner sizes.

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