Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist and apparent Eric Peterson fan, has a decent summary of Eric’s Searchnomics presentation on his blog. One of the comments caused Jeremiah to ask for help on the WAA Web Analytics Yahoo! Group.

The basic question is (paraphrasing here) "Are bounces and bounce rates for a blog home page of the same importance as they are for ‘regular’ sites?"

I have a long and poorly written response to the question on Jeremiah’s blog, but I thought I would respond here as well – hopefully a little more cogently (though no less lengthy) – to Beth Kanter’s question.

Let’s start with a definition of bounce rate just so we can all be on the same page .

Bounce Rate (for a web page) = (Single Access Visits / Visits where the web page is the entry point to the site)*100.

Single Access Visit: Any Visit where there was only 1 web page viewed

Visit: A collection of activity on a site from a single browser where there is no period of inactivity greater than 30 minutes

Entry: Where (which web page) the visit started (a visit-start or visit-entry)

For instance, in May 2007 here on this blog at my home page:

Visits with the Home Page as the Entry: 127

Single Access Visits: 110

Bounce Rate: (110/127) *100 = 86.6% (OUCH)

That means that nearly 87% of the visits that started on my blog home page ended  on that page without any other pages being looked at.

But is that really bad on a blog? Well, what are some of the proposed reason why high bounce rates are acceptable on a blog as opposed to another kind of site?

1. A blog home page (or category page) contains a lot of content in it. For instance, WordPress defaults to showing something like the 10 most recent posts on the home page so it isn’t necessary for visitors, especially loyal or repeat visitors who are just interested in my latest post to click beyond the homepage (of course, they don’t have to come to the site at all because they are probably subscribed to my feed).
2. Blogs tend to link outside of themselves (link love) where regular sites try to avoid it so on your blog, you are actually telling people to leave and read something else and those visits aren’t actually a bounce.
3. Traditionally KPIs aren’t important on a blog because they don’t measure ‘attention’ or ‘engagement’ very well. Time Spent on Page is a much more effective measure of your blog homepage’s effectiveness than Bounce Rate.

I haven’t done the segmentation yet, but looking at raw click counts I can see that there were 58 clicks from the blog home page to external resources so let’s assume that each click is equal to one visit and that those clicks/visits don’t count against the bounce rate since I directed my visitors to them. That reduces my single access count to 52 for a bounce rate of 40% – that’s still pretty darn high.

Average Time Spent on this blog’s home page in May was 3 minutes 25 seconds. Not too bad I guess. The problem is that this metric typically (and specifically in my case) excludes visits where the home page was the exit page (including single accesses) so this time spent is just for visitors who went deeper than the home page. I don’t know, and chances are you won’t know either (depending on the analytics tool you use) how much time single access visitors (e.g. ‘bouncers’) spend on that page.

I was going to put together some segments to further illustrate my discussion of point number one, but I’m feeling lazy so just let me highlight some thoughts and tactics.

Even on a blog, the home page is probably the most trafficked page you have, unless you get DIGGED or Slashdotted or something like that. The blog home page (and category pages) are also probably the most search friendly ones you have so new visitors are highly likely to enter your site there than anywhere else. So, when thinking about whether or not Bounce Rate is an important measure for your blog, start by segmenting new vs. returning visitors (yes, even though a reported new visitor might not actually be one) and see how the bounce rate compares for new vs. returning vs. all – is the new visitor bounce rate higher than one or both of the others? Then you have an engagement problem – new visitors are not tuning into your content – the home page has no scent.

Segment out your visitors that were referred to your site by search, what is their home page bounce rate? They were looking for something specific and they thought your blog might have it. If search visitors have a high degree of bounce, there’s a problem. User’s who bounce, especially new ones are not engaging in your discussion.

So, even after I excluded the visits that were taking an action I asked them to (subscribing to a feed or clicking on a link outside my blog) my home page bounce rate is still 40%. Forty Percent (4 out of 10) of visits to my blog home page never look any deeper, they never engage in my conversation! That’s a lot of people who are missing out on a great discussion (IMHO)

So, does bounce rate matter for a blog? Is a blog so special that it can ignore this standard web analytics KPI?

Absolutely NOT. Visitors that bounce off my home page, especially new visitors and search visitors are not engaging with my content even though they came to the site in the first place – which means that they thought they were going to find what they were looking for but didn’t…

The one complexity I see here is the home page content. Depending on how frequently you write new posts, the bounce rate can be highly and quickly divergent (really good on some days and really bad on others) so you will want to tie the bounce rate back to the content that was available on the home page during any given period – a lower bounce rate in period 1 compared to period 2 may indicate that the content from period 1 was ‘better’ and you can learn from it.

After a few-month hiatus, the tiny-tot voice recog blogger is back!

Enjoy!

Update:

I just found this Firefox extension for Google Reader! If the GR team adds a blogroll type function, it will be all over!

Summary

I typically use two feed readers – Bloglines and Google Reader but I’m starting to feel like I need to consolidate on one, but which to choose?

Why all of the sudden am I feeling this monolithic need? Well, the other day, for the first time ever (I have tried sporadically over the last several months) I successfully exported my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Previously, Google Reader had refused to recognize my Bloglines OPML file as valid.

So, now that I have my subscribed feeds duplicated on two services AND Google started reporting subscriber numbers last week, in all likelihood I look like two subscribers when I’m in fact one (the more things change yada, yada, yada…) – apologies to all my web analytics pals whose subscriber numbers are now deliberately inflated because of me.

what i like about bloglines

There are two main things that I find really helpful from Bloglines.

The Firefox Bloglines Toolkit Add On (not developed by Bloglines, but made possible because of their API). This add on will periodically poll Bloglines and notify me via a little red dot that I have new items to read.

The sharing feature which serves as my blogroll (yep, that one over on the right side).

what i like about google reader

Ease of use and ease of reading.

Seriously, the river of data view (all new posts) is awesome. I can quickly scan scores of posts and focus on the ones that are of interest to me. I also think that (but have no proof) that Google Reader does a better job of handling multimedia than does Bloglines. Most posts I read in GR I read there in situ because, for whatever reason, the readability is high whereas I find myself clicking through to the original post much more often when I’m in Bloglines.

In a perfect world, either Bloglines would improve their site usability (Frames, really? What year is this again?) and the readability of the posts or Google would add a similar sharing feature and a notifier add on for Firefox and then I’d have a relatively level field to choose against but until then who knows?

What do you think? Which reader do you use (if either) and which do you like better and why?

…and anyone else in the blogosphere who thinks that they are the only ones thinking about how to measure “…social and niche media online.”

Have you heard of web analytics?

Do you know that there is a whole community of talented and driven people trying to figure this out?

Have you heard of the Web Analytics Association?

Did you know that there is a conference dedicated to measurement on the web?

I was mildly exasperated last fall when Scoble complained about this, Jeremiah Owyang picked up on it and has done some nice work trying to facilitate the discussion but now I’m in a full-on tizzy.

Ok Jeff, now that I’m done ranting, let’s take a look at your specific points, knock my head against them and see what comes out.

You Say, “Except I argue that the panel means of measurement is doomed to miserable failure in the mass of niches.”

That may be true. So what? Panel-based measurement is not about measuring the fringe. In fact, the measurement companies don’t try to hide this. They are very careful and transparent about which data they have confidence in and which data they don’t have confidence in and statistical measures based on a low sample size have low confidence. Looking at it from the other side (I used to work for a relatively large publisher), services like comScore and Nielsen and Hitwise are the common language that publishers and advertisers use to work together and it seems to me (please show me if I’m wrong) that advertising dollars, by and large, still go to where the majority of the traffic is. So, the big players like Yahoo! and MSN (and even some not so big players) are still served pretty well by panel-based measurement.

Maybe you’re not really upset over these companies’ inability to measure the fringe, which is symptomatic of the market in which they operate, but rather you are rallying for a redistribution of the advertising wealth? Dunno, just playing random association here.

You Say, “What we need, I’ve long argued, is standard metrics reported from the sites’ servers or from snoopers on page and verified by a service such as Comscore or Nielsen. Old methods will not work in this new world. The same goes for Nielsen, which is buying the rest of NetRatings.”

My basic reaction to this is, “Do you remember ‘hits’?” Hits (server requests) are a standard metric reported from the sites’ servers and they were grossly abused. Thus, the page view (yes, we’ll get to that statement in a minute). There are companies that will audit and validate (ABCi comes to mind) site-analytics implementations but I’m not aware of any large scale adoption of this methodology in the online space as an effective tool for getting publishers and advertisers together.

Anecdote: Thanks to Katherine Paine we number nerds web analysts have an amusing acronym: H.ow I.diots T.rack S.uccess

You Say, “And while we’re at it, let’s figure out the new measurements that capture the unique value of this new medium: authority, speed, connectedness… The page view is dead.”

First of all, discussions of how to measure this new medium (I’ll not argue about whether this is a new medium or not because that’s usually an article of faith and so the discussion is fruitless) are happening all over the place – please see the end of this letter for a small list of links about evolving how we measure this new stuff.

Secondly, I’m having a bit of a semantic problem, if niche markets are unique, or at least, not mass then how can we possibly have a standard set of metrics for them all? The metrics needed to measure one niche market would seem to me -by definition- to be different than those needed for another niche market. That said, this new iteration of communication is still new enough that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Evolving new metrics is at a point of solving specific cases and it’s still unclear how those specific cases may be extended to the space as a whole – it’ll take time to get there, if we can get there.

Third, a lot of the pieces for what you are asking for are in place, but as with many new markets they are fragemented. Technorati, Feedburner, Bloglines and other technology providers do give us (with some work) indications on authority and connectedness (I think). I’m not sure by exactly what you mean by speed but my inkling is that sites like digg and measurement tools like buzzmetrics give us a sense of how quickly any particular post or meme gets propagated throughout the ‘sphere. As this market matures, there will be consolidation and you’ll be able to go to one place (or maybe just a few) to get answers to those questions.

Finally, the page view is not dead. It is changing and may well lose it’s current weight/authority, but it won’t go away, it will be one point in a continuum of events that will each have their own validity, usefulness and authority.

You Say, “I think it’s time for a measurement summit: Bring together the measurement companies, the advertisers and their agencies (buyers), the sites’ reps (sellers), the media sites, and technology companies and let’s hammer out some standards and methods for measurement.”

Seriously, haven’t you heard of Emetrics? Jim Sterne could probably tell us for certain, but most, if not all, the groups you mentioned above are typically represented at an Emetrics Summit – you should come too.

As for standards, well the IAB works on its standards (the standards for advertising on the internet) all the time and the WAA (Web Analytics Association) is working on measurement standards too. However, there is no ‘hammering out’ with these things, unless you mean ‘banging our collective heads against a large brick wall for a very long time’. I’ve participated in standards committees at the IAB and it takes a bloody long time to get the job done. Every group wants to protect their respective interests. Everyone understands things slightly differently. Nobody is willing to agree on anything. You can’t do standards in an afternoon or a day and probably not even in a year. Developing measurement standards is a hard, frustrating, time-consuming, and thankless task (regardless of its downstream value to the market) – so be prepared.

To get back on point, why am I in such a tizzy you ask? Well, posts like this indicate (to me) that, for whatever reason, most of the blogosphere is ignoring a valuable resource – the web analysts of the world – in this discussion. Jeremiah, (in my admittedly limited view) is the only person I see actively engaging the people who have the best chance of figuring this out. Heck, you’ve probably got (and know) web analysts from the university, from the newspaper, from federated media, are you working with them on this?

Short List of “Web 2.0″ Discussion Links

Eric Peterson’s Series on Engagement (starting with #4 make sure to read them all)

Jeremiah’s Social Media Measurement Category

Sign up for the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group

The Web Analytics Yahoo! Group

Ian S. Houston on Evolving the Web Analytics Data Model

There’s plenty more discussions out there, but these are the ones at the top of my list today.

I entreat you, and anyone else in this brave new world, to involve a web analyst in your discussion. They will help.

I updated to wordpress version 2.1 last night. Hopefully this blog is now faster and more stable. If you notice any problems, please let me know by leaving a comment or sending me an email (civy at instantcognition.com).