Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [263]
An enterprising analyst found the problem by adding the screen resolution dimension as a segment. In evaluating the bounce rate, he found that visitors using a high resolution (1400 × 1050 and above) were bouncing twice as much as visitors using a more standard resolution (1280 × 800). When testing the problem with the resolution, the cause was confirmed. Visitors on higher-resolution monitors were seeing the design of the pages simply fall apart; nothing looked right. I’ll discuss segmenting for bounce rates tomorrow.
A Recap of Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a measure of the visitors who come to your site and immediately leave. They view one page, spend only seconds, and either back out or close the session.
Typically, the visitors who bounce were looking for information and simply do not see it anywhere on the page they enter. If the page has no information or even appears to have the information they want, they will leave. This happens with poor design or unclear information.
Another reason for high bounce rates is in areas where there is more than one meaning for a keyword. Recall the example from Chapter 11: a search for “nested tables” will take a searcher to a furniture store or a programming resource. If the destination does not match the intent, then the visitor will bounce.
Examining causes for high bounce rates is a helpful method of finding problems within your website. The cause could be misleading keywords, bad landing or entry or lack of clear content. This is where viewing the website while performing analytics can help establish causality.
These are areas where many site owners have had to get better at monitoring these issues. Development companies are used to signing off on the website design, and testing is usually included. However, once the site is live, unless there is a maintenance contract in place, this falls to the site owner to detect and correct any problems. If there are major flaws, then it might be possible to get a correction made, especially if you can prove a loss in sales or visitors as a result of a missed test in that area.
Wednesday: Analyze Segmented Search Terms and Bounce Rates
Being able to look at the performance of the entire group of search segments on one report and to view them comparatively enables better evaluation. Conclusions can be drawn based on specific data. I like to download the information into a spreadsheet.
I recommend evaluating the top-performing key phrases and their subsegments. Include the typical performance measures such as pages viewed, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rate. When looking at the “typical” data in context of the search-term segment, significant differences between the segments should appear. To add another layer of analysis, add the top two or three entry pages for each segment.
By creating a large table of segments and looking at the similarities and differences between the segments, you can draw immediate conclusions concerning well-performing and converting segments and those that may be drawing visitors but not converting them.
Segment Core Search Terms
Look at Table 21-1, which shows the analytics information for two core search terms—publish and write—for a website with the goal of attracting writers who wanted to publish a book. In comparing the segments of terms that provided registrations on the site, the goal was to find the best usage of the word to properly communicate the business value
Table 21-1: Analytics information for the core search terms publish and write
Metric Data for publish Data for write
Segment Visitors 1,941 1,815
Average Segment Keyword Ranking #8 #5
Average Segment Time on Site 11:53 minutes 9:09 minutes
Average Segment Page Views 4.86 4.4
Segment Bounce Rate 48% 54%
Segment Conversion Rate 5% 3%
Simply by comparing the core terms, you can see that the number of visitors generated within the time frame is very similar. The average rankings of the top key phrases in each segment were not too far apart. However, when drilling down into the different segments, there