Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

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Web Analytics Wednesday is maturing and its very rewarding to see the number of attendees and speakers grow in Beijing and around China. This week will mark a new milestone, as it will be the first event I cannot attend and host in person. On the one hand I am sad not to be able to join and meet all the great analysts who come, on the other had I am excited to see that the event goes on, even if the demands of my job keep me from joining.

This week our guest from DCCI, an up and coming local market research firm, will share their perspective on the Web Analytics market and its importance in understanding the customer journey and brand touch points. You can find some examples of their research and opinion online.

• Hu Yanping blog post on “9 Web analysis and optimization development trends”
• DCCI sample on audience insights:  “2009 Nokia brand contact points and customer journey”

Address:

Pullman’s Steak (details and map)
Gong Ti Dong Lu Zhongguo Hong Jie Bing 2 Hao,109
Phone: +86 10 8587 1055

Agenda:

Call to Action!

Join DCCI’s Hu Yanping and Fu Zhihua  as well as 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.

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.

We are looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday Nov. 11th

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• Beijing Web Analytics Wednesday: 99click CEO Experience Sharing (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Web Analytics Wednesday logo

Both Sindey Song at Chinawebanlytics.com and I have extensively written about the importance of bounce rate as a success metric in Web Analytics (see here and here). This Wednesday we will hear from  Mr. Ma Tianyun, President & CEO of 99click, one of the most popular local Web Analytics tool providers, about their perspective on the importance of bounce rate.

His presentation will cover the following topics:

• Web Analytics Industry trends
• Site analysis, key performance indicators and best practices
• How to interpret bounce rate as well as exit rate and the usage of both metric to improve the effectiveness of web marketing

Speaker Introduction:

Mr. Ma Tianyun: CEO Business Assistant Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd (also referred to as 99click)

In 1998 Ma Tianyun received  a Ph.D. at Yale University. After graduating, he joined Oracle Corporation in the United States with a focus on data analysis, software development and management. There Mr. Ma mastered Internet software development and system development, built his technology knowledge and skills and became familiar with the Internet industry. In 2004, Mr. Ma Tianyun joined the Tsinghua Technology Park and founded Business Assistant Technology  Ltd. (hereinafter referred to 99click), and has been focused on Internet marketing, data analysis and application of research in the field.

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.

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:

Pullman’s Steak (details and map)

Gong Ti Dong Lu Zhongguo Hong Jie Bing 2 Hao,109

Phone: +86 10 8587 1055

Agenda:

19:45 – Door open / Buffet open

20:15 – 20:45 Presentation

20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session

21:00 – 22:00 Networking

Sidney and I are looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday October 14th

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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Adworld Beijing 2009

The Data Center of the Chinese Internet is organizing their big advertising bash tomorrow at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Chang’An Jie. You can find more details at www.adworld.ord.cn.

I will be giving a quick presentation at the Web Analytics Salon in the afternoon (3PM to 6PM). While I can’t figure out why people in Beijing are so enarmoured with the word “Salon”, it sounds like a fun opportunity to spread the Web Analytics word.

So say hello if you are around.

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• Web Analytics Wednesday Review: Sinotech Group: Web Analytics Getting Social (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If you are based in Shanghai, you cannot miss the inaugural Shanghai Web Analytics  Wednesday. Kudos to the team around Min Guo and thanks to the sponsors at Uptake and CIC. Great job.

Time & Date: 7pm, July 15, 2009 (3rd Wed.)

Speaker: Dave Zheng,  Chief Analyst at Newegg.com (US)

Topic: Web Analytics in E-commerce and KPIs
Dave will share how to apply web analytics in e-commence, and the importance of web analytics in operation. He will also focus on the discussion of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of ecommence industry from his experience in Newegg.com.

For more details, please visit http://www.shanghaiwebanalytics.com

The Shanghai WAW has been a long time coming. Tracy and Xu Hai first started talking about it on this blog in March 2008 in the comment thread of a post talking about a Beijing WAW event. There was some momentum but it fizzled a bit when we could not find a lead organizers.

The second wave stated when Uptake’s Elliot Ng joined a Beijing WAW in March this year and offered to sponsor a Shanghai WAW. That got the ball rolling again and after fits and starts it is done.

I feel like a proud godfather. Thanks to all who make this happen. The Beijing team is proud of you!

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• Will the real Shanghai Web Analytics organizer please stand up? (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Yesterday I had the pleasure to host the July WAW here in Beijing with John Wang, Product Manager at Sinotech Group sharing Sinotech’s perspective on Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics. Thanks John for sharing.

While John had only a couple of slides, it was slide 8 (the SinoBuzz dashboard) that caught most attention and started a discussion that lasted almost half an hour. Thanks John for being a great sport answering all the questions in detail (especially the more pesky ones from Paul Denlinger )

Some take aways from the presentation and the discussion:

• The Social Media tracking field is getting crowded, with pioneer CIC, BBS aggregator Daqi, Ogilvy One’s OBuzz and now Sinotech’s SinoBuzz. That’s great news for advertisers and ad agencies. It keeps everyone on their toes
• Sinotech has been working of Sinobuzz for more than one year. Especially the natural language processor part had been tricky, but they are confident that it produces reliable results now.
  FP: Chinese is a very difficult language to interpret with software. None of the natural language processing tools I have seen for Chinese have worked at an acceptable level. I would love to see a more detailed demonstration of Sinotech’s system on a post and aggregated level to understand if they have cracked this particular nut.
• SinoBuzz is working with connectors to plug into BBS, Blog, Social Network, Video sharing and other conversations. The platform is flexible to add other connectors to any upcoming platform or network.
  FP: This flexibility is a clear competitive advantage, given the more static nature of most competitive products.
• SinoBuzz is trying to aggregate unique metrics from various platform
  • #of BBS post, BBS clicks, BBS replies, Post Sentiment
  • #of Blog post, Blog replies, estimates about Blog post PV’s, Blog post sentiment
  • SNS #of Friends, #of status message, #of posts, # of relies, post sentiment
  • etc

  into general metrics like “reputation” and “attitude”.
  FP: I am highly sceptical of this approach since is a) lack transparency b) ignores unique characteristics of different platforms, their audiences and their impact c) uses unreliable third party resources like Alexa to gauge the impact of sources that do not publish reach (PV) data.

• The Sinobuzz dashboard is well designed and provides a good overview of brand performance. Like most dashboards (see Avinash’s Action Dashboard post), it suffers from the lack of analysis and actionable insights.
  FP: A good rule of thumb for any Dashboard: Handle with care. Dashboards without analytics and recommendations usually end up as pretty charts without impact. The key resource is not the dashboard, but an analyst who understands these numbers and your business and can provide actionable insights and recommendations based on that data. John mentioned that there are more reports to dig deeper and it would be great to understand what these reports can do. The critical queastion remains: How does the tool enable brands to take action?

What are your thoughts? Did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments section.

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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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Speaker: Dixon Dai 戴政, VP of Marketing at Qunar

Topic: Perspective on Vertical Search Engines – Travel Search Engines & ROI Performance
如何看垂直搜索和旅游搜索的模式及ROI

I have always believed that the application of web analytics is most advanced in industries and verticals that have a direct $$$ interest in the performance of their websites. The travel industry has been on of the first verticals to make e-commerce work in China and as a result travel sites are leading web analytics users as well. The first to share her perspective was Anya Zhao from Air China. This time we are going to hear from Qunar, China’s leading travel search engine. As most e-commerce sites they have to optimize the cost and quality of their traffic as well as the conversion of the traffic on their sites. It will be interesting to learn how they manage that. An additional challenge Qunar has to face is that the final transaction is happening on their partners site, so in order to track real conversions they need data across companies and sites. If you are interested to learn how Qunar solves these challenges…

Please join me and more than 30 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:
Lugas Villa (Description and Map)
朝阳区三里屯北街41号同里后
7 Sanlitun North Street, (right behind ‘3.3 Plaza’ in Sanlitun)

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

Please register here to join our event. Looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday June 10th.

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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