Ok, another thing I hear marketers at the conventions I have been attending talk about with great obsession is conversion analysis, and rightly so.

But we do so to the point that we limit our analysis to the conversion zone at the expense of overlooking an equally common cause: usability.

If you reflect on your personal experiences with websites you have abandoned for reasons other than irrelevant content, you’ll probably agree with me that the #1 (or #2) reason you did so had to do with usability.

You couldn’t find something.  The site was too busy and difficult to scan.  The look and feel just kind of annoyed you.

These are the “first touch” reasons that will send most users away from your site before they get to point of considering your value proposition.

And so I have found myself increasingly interjecting, “you don’t have a conversion problem, you have a usability problem”.

The take-away is that scrutiny of landing pages and “conversion” pages should be complemented with studies on usability.

I am in Toronto now for SMX Analytics, largely moderated by Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox.

I am so surprised to hear the consistent references to high bounce rate as problems.  This seems irresponsible and short-sighted, as though a user who only accesses one page on your site is a failure of some kind.

Consider Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button

This search option is there for when you think you know exactly the destination in mind, or just want to add a bit of chance to the search.  Regardless, I would argue that at least 25% of searches are users just looking for one page that has all the information they want.

One Page Visits That Should Not Be More

• “Definition” searches.  This is a common motive (see my 10 Motives of Search).
• Contact info - no reason for two pages here.  I’m feeling lucky!
• Wikipedia searches.  The pages on that site tell a story from A - Z on one massive scrolling page.
• “First Touch” comparison, research searches.  If you are price comparing, or skimming through options in order to round up a bunch of sites to consider for a purchase, you are less likely to go deep on the first touch.  A bounce here just means you were considered.

The fact is that people want to get where they are going fast, and leave fast, unless you have the unique privilege of running a site like Facebook or ESPN that has a valid reason to engage people.  I am not saying bounce rate has no value as a data source.  I am saying it can be worse than no value, it can give you entirely the wrong picture.  Be careful with bounce.

Measure Impact, Not Bounce

Instead of bounce, consider:

• Time on site
• Referring keyword (was it a “one night stand” keyword?  Maybe they found what they were looking for and have no more reason to come back)
• Return visits - maybe the bounce was a first touch and the user is coming back.

We’ve all heard about the many cost-cutting measures companies are taking to survive in what I call “The Post-Bush Economy”.

One measure we haven’t heard enough about is analytics tuning.

We hear about budgets being re-allocated or slashed. Traditional is moving online, viral and buzz are being questioned, RFP’s are going out in hopes of finding less expensive vendors, and so on.

But can an organization truly optimize its channels if it hasn’t made the most of its web analytics data?

As our analytics guru Micah Fisher-Kirshner said in a recent newsletter, “Ironically, most of the large companies we have worked with have such nascent analytics practices that their requirements barely scratch the surface of even GA’s capabilities.”

This leads to the question: how can a company know what to cut, and by how much, unless they have a highly optimized analytics practice?

The first step in budget re-allocationis investing in the enhancement of your analytics practice.

If you are reading this and thinking that your analytics practice is probably not what it should be, contact us, we’ll give you an “analytics check-up” that will ensure your organization can make wise budget decisions to survive in the Post-Bush economy.

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)

I get asked this question all the time, “is our bounce rate too high?”

Here is the reality of bounce rates: they don’t matter if you don’t analyze them against another performance indicator.

Here’s an example - the bounce rates on home pages tend to be lower than internal pages.

Why?

Because on a home page, visitors have to click a few things to get closer to the information they want.

So - yea!  You have a lower bounce rate on your homepage.

But your internal pages may have higher bounce rates.

So what.

If visitors found the internal page because that page gave them the information they wanted, you should be looking at time on site (TOS), or, if you have a direct marketing agenda, the response rates to your calls to action.

I’ll follow this post up with WHY bounce rates are even less meaningful than we think.