Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Over the years I have been following Omniture’s (slow) engagement with China with ongoing interest. Especially since we have clients who use SiteCatalyst and have seen strong interest in SearchCenter in the market. While I understand that China is still a comparatively small market for the big analytics vendors, I would have hoped for more leadership from Omniture, sooner, in the largest Internet market by number of users.

Finally their  leadership looks like it is forthcoming with Omniture naming Arics Poon as their MD for China. Arics is a HK native and a very experienced China executive with roles  as Vice President & MD at Oracle and later as GM for Microsoft China.  During the last two month I had the chance to talk to Arics a few times and could clearly see his vision  for Omniture in China.

Congratulations to Omniture for recruiting such a senior leader. You can reach Arics by email and at Omniture’s China offices.

Beijing Office Address:
Office 511, 5/F., South Block, Tower C, Raycom InfoTech Park
No. 2 Kexueyuan South Road
Zhongguangcun, Beijing
100190 P.R. China
美国安力卓有限公司北京办事处
北京海淀区科学院南路2号融科资讯中心C座南楼5層511室
邮编100190

Hong Kong Office Address:
Level 15, Nexxus Building
41 Connaught Road
Central, Hong Kong
+852 3757 9666 ext 9663 tel
+852 3757 9401 fax

香港中環干諾道中四十一號
盈置大廈十五樓

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• Omniture Site Catalyst training in Beijing this September (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Image via CrunchBase

Omniture is getting more serious in China, with a new GM in town and some upcoming trainings. Each training is a full two day workshop and will cost RMB 8,000.

If you want to bulk up on your Omniture skill and add a line to your resume, please leave a comment on this blog or email directly to Omniture at cloh[at]omniture[dot]com. If you email them, just let them know you heard about it here.

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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After all your feedback about the upcoming Omniture training in Beijing (March 17th, 18th) & Shanghai (March 19th, 20th) , Omniture realized it is not enough to provide a in debth 2 day Omnitiure training.  (Yes they are learning )

So, for those of you who want to get a glimps of SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter, or who have specific questions to ask about either tool, Omniture and me are hosting a

- “Free Omniture Online Business Optimization workshop” -

Time:  Wednesday April  March 11th,  3:30PM – 5PM (Thanks Shoji for the correction)
Place: Kerry Center, CBD, 11th floor, Regus offices

The workshop will focus in Omniture Site Catalyst and Search Center and will be lead by as Omniture Sales engineer.  It will cover the basics of both tools in the first hour and aims to answer attendees questions in following 30 min.

Of course this is by no means an in depth training (For that we still have to pay ), but it should be an insightful afternoon nevertheless, for those of us working with Omniture’s tools, and those who aim to do that in the future.

See you at tomorrows WAW!

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• March Web Analytics Wednesday Beijing with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)
• Upcoming Omniture training in Beijing and Shanghai (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

One of the major limitations on Web Analytics in China is the lack of skilled and experienced analysts. Once a company or agency has decided on persuing the digital ROI path though Web Analytics, they soon notice that while tools are free (like Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics and Microsoft AdCenter Analytics) or can be bought from respected vendors (like Omniture, Webtrends and others), skilled and experienced analysts are in severe short supply. (as I’ve argued before). As a result, most analytics teams are made up of one senior person, spending most of his/her time on training and a bunch of smart young analyst coming staight from university or from a market research background. Most of the trainig is on the job and done informally. Most of it is done “on the job”. I have never met a certified Omniture or GA analyst in China (let me know if you are!).

This is about to change, with Omniture offering their first Site Catalyst Fundamentals training in Beijing and Shanghai in March. The training will last 2 days and will be conducted in Chinese  Here are the dates and prices:

BEIJING – MAR 17 – 18

SHANGHAI – MAR 19-20

Prices per person range from USD 1,500 to USD 1,800. Given current exchange rates, thats beween RMB 10K and 12.5K.

This is a princely price for China, given that it reflects a monthly salary for a senior analyst / senior analytics consultant in the market. While I am excited about this opportunity, I am not sure how many companies can afford that kind of money in the current economic situation. I can only urge my readers to review Avinash’s 90/10 rule.

• Our Goal: Highest value from Web Analytics implementation.
• Cost of analytics tool & vendor professional services: $ 10.
• Required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”: $ 90.
• Bottom-line for Magnificent Success: Its the people.

Re-read it! Re-read it again! And now go looking for the money. If you are lucky and find a pot of gold, contact your local Omniture salesperson (Darry Su, CY Yueng) or, lacking their contact info, comment on this post to sign up for the training. I will then share the Omniture contact info with you via email.

I am looking forward to seeing you in March.

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I just got an email from Stephane Hamel announcing V 1.02 of WASP, his Web Analytics Solution Profiler utility. Congrats and kudos to Stephane. Good job. Rock on.

For those who have not heard about WASP here is the skinny:

WASP is a Firefox plugin for Web Analytics professionals that allows you to easily do

• Quality Assurance:  Check If your own pages are correctly tagged, that is
  • If there is a web analytics tag on your page (works for ad tracking tools, A/B testing tools and e-commerce tracking as well). This works page by page, but also automatically with a crawler if you are using the licensed version.
  • If that tag is executed correctly and is sending the right data to the Web Analytics server (e.g. the right profile ID in GA, or the right Omniture SAINT tag). This works especially well for Omniture and Google Analytics, since WASP provides an “enhanced tags view” that explains each data point sent to the server.
• Market Research:  If and page you are visiting has a web analytics solution installed (e.g. your customers, your competitors, or your own business in other countries)

I have been an enthusiastic WASP user for more than a year and encourage you to test it out. My only reservation is that it doens’t work well for Flash “experiences”. To Q&A those, we have been using HTTP Watch and looked at the data sets send to the server manually. I am looking forward to version 2.0,  so I can ditch HTTP Watch completely.

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Just found a note to myself from last month. It said “If you don’t write up the event review immediately, you will never do it.” So here we go, no bad consciousness this month.
As usually a colorful band of web analyst as sympathizers met up at Club Camp for a merry get together. This time we had the honor to host a presentation by Song Jie, CEO of Banru a local web analytics vendor. They position their product Web -IA as direct competitor to the likes of WebTrends and Omniture, so this promised to be an interesting presentation.

Presentation on Web-IA
This summary will necessary a bit limited since your truly is not as good in Chinese as he should be. What you read here is often only possible through the kind support of WAW attended who help with the translation.

• Web IA started as early as 2001 to provide basic analytics solutions.
• Multiple versions of their products compete is several market segments from medium to high end. In the high end Song Jie believed their feature set outstrips Omniture.
  While I believe this to be a very aggressive claim, their impressive client list seems an evidence of their local success. Song Jie especially highlighted their partnership with Microsoft’s Service, who implemented Web-IA at several corporate clients.
• While none of the attendees was a user of the product, we could agree that have a strong engineering team in town is a strong competitive advantage. Song Jie commented that their tech support team is able to provide custom reports within 24h after a client request.
• Web IA is based on a web interface, and does sport direct data warehouse access, for custom reports their rely on their tech support and engineering team.
• Web IA can be integrated with various BI tools. While it lacks standard API’s, their engineering team has several standard implementations that can be customized to client needs.

Attendees
With about 19 attendees the event size is stabilizing. Interestingly enough the attendees rotate quite a lot. We have a core group of 7 – 9 people who are there every time and some 25 – 30 people who join once in a while. Another interesting trend is the growth of attendees that are not web analysts but advertisers. I see this as an encouraging trend, although the discussion are more detailed with fellow analysts

Discussion
This time discussion were a bit short, due to the late start of the event. After some brainstorming we agreed to change the format a bit. Instead of a formal dinner set up, we will sent the food up in a buffet arrangement, so we walk around and talk to each other. That should facilitate communication and discussion.

Please use the comment section for detailed feedback and idea what we can do better. If you want to join our illustrious line up of speakers, please also drop me a not. We are very interested in case studies and sample analytics reports. Vendors are also welcome to present their products.

So long and until next month.
Florian

A small but happy band of web analytics practitioners and friends of the industry met on Thursday, Jan. 24th in Beijing to talk about life, food and the status of the Web Analytics industry in China. 10 people from a wide variety of background came to share their insights and progress. It was in the good tradition of Web Analytics Wednesdays that they sat together in peace and friendship.  This is their story.

People

• Growing from a small basis the attendance increased by more than 300%.
• All the participants came from agencies including MRM Worldwide, OgilvyOne, DMG and WanMo. I suspect this is a reflection of the current state of the industry. While large US companies now often do their web analytics in house, its the global agencies with existing skills and global clients that pioneer analytics in China. I have seen smaller startup and SEM agencies experimenting as well, but larger operations are only sustained by large agencies.
• No vendors joined although Google and Sinotech Media RSVP’ed. I expect them to join next time. With Darryl from Omniture joining as well, we should have a nice vendor panel. I am already looking forward to that meeting

Discussion

This time the discussion focused on tools and benchmarks

• Tools
  • Most agencies work with complex corporate tools that their clients license globally. These include Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics and HBX. The consensus is that these tools are too complex for the local market. Most analysts are new to web analytics and they have a hard time getting used to complex interfaces, inconsistent metrics and bad setups.
  • Google Analytics is the clear winner in terms of ease of use, but expertise is missing there as well
  • There is strong interest in locally developed tools, especially for popularizing web analytics with local clients
  • Lack of vendor support and the non-existence of experienced analysts or even consultants leads to mess ups in installation and set-up that compromise data quality and analysis. Stronger support from the vendor side is sorely needed.
• Benchmarks
  • While no one knows of existing benchmarks for CPC and CTR in China, the number published by JPMorgan are generally seen as fantasy. (Much like their balance sheet, I guess)
  • While there is some value in general benchmarks, data shows that these numbers vary widely across industry. While FMCG campaigns have lower CPC, tech campaigns tend to have higher CPC’s
  • Most agencies calculate their CPC benchmarks in RMB, others use USD, which can make comparison difficult, when you are not stating the unit you are using

Sponsorship

All of us were extremely grateful to Eric T. Peterson and WebAnalyticsDemystified for their generous sponsorship of the event. The cheap prices of the event resulted in a free for all. (Or maybe we just didn’t drink enough BaiJiu). We promise to drink more next time. I sincerely hope Eric and his team find time some day to join us for a session, so we can thank them in person. Eric, wouldn’t the Beijing Olympics be a good reason excuse to drop by?