Web Analytics Guru and all-around nice guy, Eric T. Peterson, is doing a webcast - exclusively for Web Analytics Association Members. The webcast is entitled "Web Analytics Is Easy!", can’t wait to find out what that means but more importantly, there will be an extended question and answer session at the end of the webcast! Ever wish that you could have a sit-down with a luminary like Eric to find out what’s what? Well, the cost of membership to the WAA is probably cheaper than getting Eric on a consulting gig or traveling to an Emetrics summit so it might be easier to get your management to defray the cost on your membership than getting the OK for Emetrics. Hey, you do what you can right?

The webcast is next Wednesday, August 29th (yip just nine days away) so hop to it!

Disclaimer: I am a Director on the WAA Board

If you don’t understand the context of your web data then all you can do is report the data - you can’t interpret it correctly.

If we think of web analytics as this overly-simplified equation: people(motivations) + website =  actions(data), as analysts, we are trying to solve for people(motivations).

So if you’re the analyst, you’ve got the data and I am sure you are crazy-familiar with it, but that’s only half of it. Knowing your website(s) - how it operates, what changes are made and when, how changes are made - is the other half. If you don’t understand your website and how it works, how can you properly interpret the data to understand how your audience is reacting to your site? How can you proactively recommend changes or tests on the site if you don’t understand how it works?

photo credit: threed - some rights reserved.

You Can’t

So, if you can, do a tour in web production  - this will give the best chance of understanding the website context.

If you don’t understand the website context, your analysis (if you’re trying to do it) is just a W.A.G.

Ad Age reports that AOL is acquiring behaviorial targeting firm Tacoda.

Is this a Google challange or just being caught up in the current acquisition frenzy?

So, I was cruising My Netscape and saw this interesting link title from BBC News: "Google cookies will auto delete"

Auto delete? Since when is this a special feature that only Google can bring to market? All cookies have an expiration date - last time I checked. It’s just that often, they are set with an expiration date so far in the future as to be effectively perpetual. 

The article quotes Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy council, as saying (in a statement)

"listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we’ve concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies."

Oh, and there’s this interesting bit from the article, "They will be deleted unless the user returns to a Google site within the two-year period, prompting a re-setting of the file’s lifespan."

Interesting, it’s not a fixed two years, it’s relative to your last visit to Google so every time you visit Google the cookies expiration date will be reset to a new date. When was the last time you went 2 years without visiting a website that you found extremely useful (as most people would say about Google)?

I actually like the idea, from a certain point of view, users who have not visited the site in some amount of time (2 years in this case) could be deemed to have abandoned the site (in a much more considered way than we in web analytics tend to look at it) and therefore Google doesn’t need to keep track of that user’s preferences anymore.

The thing that I find weird is that the BBC - via the title of the article - seems to think that Google is doing something that no one else could or might do.

I wonder what the implications to web analytics would be if the providers implemented a similar function? Would it wreak havoc on the data? Probably not unless the cookie expiration date was set absurdly low (less than 4 weeks or so). What about a new metric - "Lost Visitors" or "Qualified Abandons"?

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.