All That Bounces Is Not Bad

If you have any connection with web analytics then, I am sure, you have heard about the bounce rates (see Bounce Rate Demystified and Typical Bounce Rates). A lot of analysts and a few web analytics tools are obsessed with the bounce rates. High bounce rate is considered bad. If you are one of those who is obsessed with the bounce rate or think that all that bounces is bad then this blog post is for you.

This post was originally published on 10/28/2009.  After 9 years of writing this post, I still get questions about Bounce rate that are answered in this post so I am updating to make this post live again.

I do believe that bounce rate is a great starting metrics when you are trying to optimize your site but be careful and make sure that you are measuring the true bounce rate. Below are the three factors that lead to the misreporting of the bounce rates

1. Links to external sites - Many sites have links to the external sites such as sponsors, micro sites etc. Considering those external links as exits will count visits as bounces even though the visitors are doing exactly what you want them to do (e.g. click on those links that you provided them). See below a screen shot from First Tech Credit Union, there are few external link s contributing to the bounces.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Online Ads – If you serve ads on your site you are providing links to external sites. Visitors who land on your site, see an ad that grabs their attention are going to click on it (isn’t that what you want so that you can command higher rates for the ads?). It is not really a bounce because visitors are taking the action that you want them to take. See the screenshot from Techcruch which is full of ads and I bet this page (and other article pages) has a very high bounce rate.

3. Destination Pages – Pages that provide the information that the visitors are looking for is what I call destination pages. Usually you will see the visitors arriving from bookmark or search to the internal pages on your site that provide the visitors with the information that the visitors are looking for. Since those pages serve the visitors’ need you are likely to see high bounce rates on those pages. Those bounce are not bad. Some might argue that you should try to drive visitors into the other sections of the site but I can bet that in most of the cases you won’t see significant drop in bounce rate no matter how hard you try. Below is an example of a page on First Tech Credit Union that could have a very high bounce rate. I arrived at this page by searching for the “Phone number for First Tech in Redmond”. When I arrived on this page I got what I was looking for and I bounced.
   
   
   
   

Are you considering these factors when analyzing the bounce rates on your site? Questions? Comments?

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Retargeting 101

This post was originally posted in July 2009. I am updating it again as this is a topic that I get asked a lot lately and I have also recently launched a new course on the topic. In the course I cover Retargeting Fundamentals and how to do retargting on Facebook. (purchase course on Udemy or on Global Analytics Academy) and will be releasing the one on Google soon.


According to Wikipedia

Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral search retargeting, or simply, retargeting ) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion.

How does it work?

You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done for the day. Next morning you go back to your computer and browse to a news site. As the page of that site loads so does an Ad that is from the site that you visited yesterday (where you looked at some products but did not buy)


Example

Neel visited Sketcher’s site (They engage in retargeting - http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=109038. He looked at few shoes, added one to his cart but then decided that he is going to look some more before he buys them. He was tired after long day so he decided to logoff from his computer and takes some rest.

Few minutes later he gets back on his computer but before he goes and checks more shoes, an article about online privacy in an email catches his eyes so he clicks on the link to open the webpage to read that article. As he browses to that article on NYTimes.com, he sees an ad from sketchers on that same page. The page content has nothing to do with the shoes but the person reading it has. Sketchers is retargeting to bring back the visitor who had left the site (sketchers.com) without converting (purchasing). The main idea behind retargeting is to reinforce the brand message and bring the visitors back to the site so that visitor can convert and become customers.




Shopping at Sketchers.com



NYTimes Serves Sketchers Ad

How does it work technically?

When a visitor visits a site (sketchers in this case), the site (sketchers.com) runs a JavaScript from a 3rd party ad network or an ad exchange, which (the JavaScript)then drops a cookie on the visitor’s computer. This cookie is usually anonymous i.e. it contains an identifiers to identify the visitor (computer) but does not know any personally identifiable information such as name, phone, email etc. of the visitor. As the visitor browses the site this JavaScript can collect the information about visitors browsing behavior and then tie it back to the cookie. All an ad network (3rd party) knows that cookie id 123ABC67NBZ looked at some product, put them in shopping cart and then left without completing the purchase. Most likely, it does not know that cookie id 123ABC67NBZ belongs to Neel (some retargeting products now are tying PII information too but most of them are still anonymous).

If the visitor then browses to another sites on the internet (NYTimes.com in this case) which also has a relationship with that same ad network (the relationship between sites and ad network gets complex but that’s beyond the scope of this post) i.e. this other site also has a JavaScript from that same ad network on their pages then that JavaScript(on a page on NYTimes.com) can read the previously set cookie to identify the visitor. By reading the cookie, the Ad Network knows who this visitors (computer) is (anonymously) and what sites this visitor (computer) was on, what products he looked at and if he abandoned the shopping cart or not and then serve up an appropriate retargeting ad.


Related Post
Behavioral Targeting 101

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Need help with Retargeting?  Contact me at batraonline@gmail.com

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