Engage-Digital

I’ve always worked on the basis that doing calculations using mixed metrics ( by which in this case I mean page views, visits/sessions & uniques) whilst doing an analysis is generally not good. There are some exceptions but when looking at conversion I have tended to avoid calculating it based on page views as a percentage of visits/sessions.

There have been many cases when, in my work with clients, I have faced situations in which their conversion figures have consistantly been a shade higher or lower than my own over a given time period. These have in almost all cases been due to their figures being based on actual sales as measured in their sales management systems whilst I have generally only had access to the analytics data. Not an ideal situation as I would always rather work with actual sales data but it hasn’t been a major concern since the data is generally trended over several months and we are able to see where the changes have occurred – crucial insight has still been available.

In one instance I broke my own rule and took it a step further by looking at the conversion rate using page views to the Order Complete page instead of visits and naturally the figure went up. Of course there are several reasons why the Order Complete page may be viewed more than once in a single visit and not all relating to multiple purchases.

In a follow up session I looked in more depth at regional visitor profiling using weighted segmentation described here. It showed a significant difference in conversion (based on visits only) between the UK and “Rest of World” – not surprising since in this particualr instance overseas delivery was not catered for. However there was a small market oversees that was using the site for purchases to be delivered in the UK.

I got back to thinking about the original difference in conversion between their figures and mine and decided to run a comparative analysis of the Order Complete page based on UK segment and “Rest of World”, this time looking at page views per visit on the Order Complete page and trending over the Christmas period. The pattern became much clearer. Whilst visitors from the UK viewed the Order Complete page on average once per session throughout the period, page views per visit on the Order Complete page for the “Rest of World” segment spiked at 2 around Christmas time.

Rationale? The site didn’t have multiple addresses functionality in the checkout process and so overseas visitors looking to do their Christmas shopping had to repeat the process for each purchase.

I would still be wary of doing this kind of thing but in some circumstance it can yield some surprising and interesting results.

Bounce Rate (a.k.a. Single Access Ratio) is much used and well known in web analytics. Described simply as the ability of an entry page to retain a visitor after arrival and drive him/her onto another page or goal within the site, it is easy to understand its importance. As the Bounce Rate goes up the apparent ability of an entry page to retain a visitor and solicit another action leading to another page or goal goes down.

It is so important that in Google’s recent upgrade of its analytics tool, the overall profile was considerably raised throughout the user interface. Given the huge uptake of GA this is only likely to bolster its overall profile as a benchmark metric.

Google’s own notes on the Bounce Rate read as follows:
“Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages are not relevant to your visitors. You can minimise Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy”

If the resultant action from an observed high Bounce Rate is to make changes to an entry page then it is probably worth setting some additional context.

Without wanting to reduce the status of Bounce Rate in the performance analysis of any site it is worth asking the question of whether a high Bounce Rate is always such a bad thing. It is precisely because of the growing popularity of the metric that it is worth considering its status.

Below are six points which add a bit of context to the Bounce Rate metric:

1. Networked sites with separate analytics accounts (same tool)
Larger organisations may run a suite of sites or micro-sites which complement each other but are not fully integrated. As a result each site may have its own analytics account. There may also be a roll up account sitting across all sites. In circumstance like this a visitor arriving on one micro-site from PPC search may then move straight onto another if there is relevance and an available link. This may be an entirely desirable outcome but the Bounce Rate report in the analytics account for the original site will show the visit as a single page visit and therefore contribute to a higher Bounce Rate. In this case it is worth looking at the same page in the roll up account to get a better idea of the overall Bounce Rate.

2a.Variations: Home Page, List page, product page
As with many reporting metrics in web analytics, averages can sometime be misleading. The same goes for Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate will vary considerably between different types of page. Generally it is likely to be lower on the home page and increase the deeper into the site the entry page is. So a category page will have a higher Bounce Rate and a product page Bounce Rate will most likely be higher still. As the pages become more focused and less generalised there is less to encourage a visitor entering to look around. If they don’t see what they want immediately it is easier to go back than forward.

2b.Weight of entry visits
The previous point has greater relevance when linked with the weighting of entry visits. In an extreme example, if 90% of visits enter on a home page which has a Bounce Rate of 10% and the other 10% of visits enter on product pages which have a Bounce Rate of 90% there is clearly little point in diverting resource to address the Bounce Rate issue on the product pages. The overall site Bounce Rate will be low anyway and until the landing strategy changes to make more use of product pages, or better still landing pages, there is little point in diverting resource.

3. News & media sites
Bounce Rate may be viewed very differently when looking at news and other media sites. Peaks in traffic on these sites often occur on week days at around 9am and again at around lunchtime. Visitors may often come in, take a quick look at the home page headlines and leave again. This would be enough to get a quick fix until there is time to read more. As lifestyles become busier and more time pressured this kind of activity is less surprising. On the web this would results in a high Bounce Rate. The solution might not be to encourage the visitor to delve deeper (thereby lowering the Bounce Rate) but in fact to make sure visitors can get exactly what they want on that fleeting visit thereby ensuring they continue to return for their fix. Bounce Rate has reduced status here.

4. Brochureware sites / offline calls to action (web-centric telephone numbers)
Some sites may not have a business goal that can be easily measured online. The desired action may require a telephone call. In this case it is possible that a landing page could supply all the required information for a visitor to take the decision to act and pick up the phone – hopefully to dial a telephone number that is unique to the website or landing page. High Bounce Rate + desired outcome.

5. Traffic source: Banners Vs PPC entering on a landing page
Just as different entry points have different Bounce Rates the same entry point may have different Bounce Rates depending on the sources of referral traffic. One landing page may be acting as a receptor for an advertising campaign which uses both online display (banners etc) as well as pay per click search (PPC) advertising. It is quite possible that banners may direct the greater volume of traffic and have a lower Bounce Rate whilst PPC may drive a lower volume with a higher Bounce Rate yet despite this the overall volume of good outcomes may still be low. In this instance it would be worth looking at overall volume of good outcomes for both referral sources and see which has the better conversion rate – sometimes the effect of a higher Bounce Rate can actually act as a quality filter to weed out the wheat from the chaff.

If you use or are thinking of using a tag based analytics tool pay close attention to your page naming convention. Get this wrong and you’re toast. Get it right and life will be sweet.

The page naming convention is the piece of the jigsaw that allows you to find and identify content groups and pages in your analytics GUI. Some tools like Google Analytics don’t make use of page naming conventions, they just use the page URLs and / or possibly page titles. Others like WebSideStory’s HBX have specific variables in the tag that need to be filled.

The page naming convention allows the user to split areas of a site into content groups and identify pages uniquely within those content groups. It might be easier to think of it as a kind of Russian Doll. You have the site as the main content group, within that you may have a number of other content groups representing your main areas and within each of those main areas you may have another sub-level(s) of content and so on. Establishing unique content groups and page is important when creating funnels and segments which are crucial to doing in depth analysis.

It’s wise to create a naming convention before adding the tags. Within WebSideStory’s HBX the content group names and the page names are represented in two main variable within the javascript tag, these are identified as PN=… and MLC=…

JS tags for other tools use similarly identifiable variables.

Stuff to bear in mind before creating a decent page naming convention:
1. Before anything else, always think about the (business) objectives for the site and what questions your analytics tool will need to answer . Gather together the key stakeholders and ask them what their requirements are. It’s a nightmare to go through all the trouble of setting up an analytics tool only to find you can’t answers questions from a key stakeholder.

2. Do you want a “horizontal” or “vertical” naming convention?
“Horizontal” naming conventions generally identify pages by type right the way across the site i.e. Category, sub-category, product pages etc.

“Vertical” naming conventions identify pages by section i.e. ‘News>UK>article title’, ‘Sport>football>article title’.
Generally speaking media sites like online news providers tend to use vertical page naming conventions while sites selling stuff tend to use horizontal page naming conventions.

3. Don’t use illegal characters. These may be things like “()-*&? etc. They may also vary from tool to tool. Always check with the analytics provider first. To be absolutely safe stick to upper and lower case letters and “/” to separate content groups.
There are other issues with tag based tools around ensuring that you are tracking links properly, streaming video if you use it, internal search etc but these are technical issues that should be covered off as part of the essential house keeping of tagging.
If you use a tag based system that doesn’t make use of page naming conventions consider how you can improve things by using search engine friendly page URLs. There are two good reasons to make the effort here:
1. It will help categorise pages in the analytics tool user interfac
2. It will help with your SEO
Example: (you can click on the image to enlarge it)

If you are looking at setting up SEO friendly URLs you can still consider them in the context of horizontal of vertical although they will work better for SEO if they are based on a vertical solution. The trade off is a business decision you will have to take.

The objective of this post has simply been to point out that the level of ease and therefore the depth of insight you get from your analytics tool can be much enhanced if you take the time at the outset to establish a decent road map in you naming convention. I have saved myself a lot of agro in past doing this. Any thoughts or comments most welcome.