Engage-Digital

One should always bear in mind that correspondong data from different sources won’t always match, but one might hope that data from the same source but arrived at in different ways would still match. Like most analytics tools Google Analytics isn’t perfect, however by any standard what follows appears to be odd.

I’ve seen it before in GA… but in this example a filter was applied in the ‘entry pages’ report using /product/ and trending by month over the past 2 years. Looking at the final month – June 2010 – the volume of entries against these pages seemed a bit low. Shortening the time frame showing only showing June 2010 the data seemed much more in keeping with what would be expected. The point is GA appears to be producing two completely different figures for June 2010 with the only differentiating factor being the time frame of the report.

Concerned about this the report were then segmented using All, New and Returning default segments i.e. not custom built segments and still retaining the /product/ filter in the report. The results looked like this:

June 2010 only

Jan 2008 to June 2010

Although the two screen shots above don’t show June 2010 comparative data it’s still possible to see that in there is something odd going on in the second of the two reports. It should not be possible for All Visits to be significantly less than combined visits from New and Returning visitors.

I can see no reason why it should do this and GA provides no warning in the rport to indicate what it is doing – as it does with sampled data.

The only route to resolve is to shorten the time frame over which the report is run (trial and error unfortunately) and see how far one can get before the data starts to go wonky. You need a good overall knowldge of what to expect from you data in order to spot this.

A couple of months ago cScape’s Customer Engagement Unit and econsultancy released the 4th Annual Customer Engagement survey.  It’s the largest and most comprehensive of its kind globally with over 1,000 respondents.

With the seemingly inexorable onward march of social media, the economic woes of the world in the past 2 years and an increasingly savvy consumer, businesses are having a more challenging time in managing their brands and retaining loyalty amongst their existing customer base let alone acquiring new customers.

Not surprisingly social technologies feature heavily this year but the overriding themes of quality and customer service are also floating to the top as important mainstays in developing customer engagement.

As in previous years the report is essential reading for any marketers looking to the future and how to manage the relationships with their customer base.

The 2010 report can be downloaded here. If you’re interested, previous year’s reports can be downloaded here:

3rd Annual Customer Engagement Survey: 2009

2nd Annual Customer Engagement Survey: 2008

1st Annual Customer Engagement Survey: 2007

With the UK launch of the iPad now imminent (barring any more delays) marketers have started asking questions about what Apple’s new tablet will mean for them, their businesses and brands. Having experienced the impact of the iPhone naturally they want to know what the iPad may hold in store for them

Partly in response to questions so far and partly in anticipation of further inquiries the team at cScape’s Customer Engagement Unit have put together a white paper on the potential of the iPad for business and marketers. The opinion pieces range from apps (naturally!) to e-commerce, to publishing to analytics and much more. Have a read.

You can either read it online here or download the PDF here.

Lately I have been coming across a series of small but potentially significant shortcomings in the web analytics tools I have been using. I only unearthed them as I was playing around with different ways of getting the same output, in other words sense checking the data I was looking at.

The trouble is if I hadn’t done that I might have taken the first answer as gospel and moved on, unaware that the insight I was inferring was based on incorrect data. I’m talking about the kinds of things that are genuinely obscure and might not impact that many users but for those that do they could make a big difference.

Given that the industry’s mantra is broadly ‘rubbish data = zero insight and worse, possibly damaging action taken as a result’, it seems as though the suppliers of web analytics tools have a responsibility to document and make freely available the shortcoming of their products especially where those shortcomings could have a serious impact. Of course the trouble that would be suicide.

It’s a catch 22, keep quiet and hope that you don’t do too much damage to your client’s site’s or take a more responsible standpoint, ’fess up and deal with implications that come with it.

Bounce rate is a kind of standard bearer metric for measurement in web analytics, it’s up there with conversion. Even novices in web analytics know what bounce rate is, and when asked what should be the objective regarding bounce rate you’d have to be a lunatic to say anything other than “try to reduce it”. But increasingly, I think there are some misconceptions about this metric. Remembering that bounce rate applies to both entry pages and referring sources of traffic, two thoughts that come to mind are as follows:

1. When thinking about bounce rate in the context of entry pages it is hardly surprising that it’s lower on the home page than on a product page. I’ve seen very few sets of data in which the situation is reversed. I think this is because the home page offers a bigger target, i.e. there are more options for a visitor when they arrive on the home page than if they arrive on a highly specific product page. Trying to reduce the bounce rate on a product page is worthy and will yield results for sure but don’t expect to get it down to home page levels.
2. Lower bounce rate = more actual conversions. I’m not disagreeing with this but increasingly as I look at weekly and monthly trended data for various clients I see examples where BOTH bounce rate and conversion actually go UP against a particular referral source. This in turn quite often results in higher yield volumes as well.

This isn’t to say that it’s OK to let the bounce rate metric rocket up, retaining more visitors at the same conversion rate WILL of course produce greater conversion yield volumes. It’s simply to say that it’s not necessarily worth freaking out the minute a bounce rate shows signs of edging upwards. I would always look at the surrounding metrics to build a bit of additional context before deciding on a course of action.

The old adage ”quality not quantity” comes to mind here. A higher bounce rate might mean lower visitor retention but if more of those visitors are converting and the overall conversion yield is going up then that might prompt another old adage “if it isn’t broke….”