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NEWSLETTERS | MAY, 2010 Measuring What Really Matters By Christopher Butler Measurement means all kinds of things to different people. In the early days of the internet, webmasters, content to simply count traffic to their site, slapped visitor counters onto their homepages. The higher the number, the more the glory (and, oh, the glory when that counter advanced into the thousands!). But once database-driven websites became more common, the coveted hit—the metric everyone had come to obsess over—became irrelevant. After all, the number of times a call is made to your database, especially for graphics-heavy sites, is irrelevant to any measure of success. We eventually did get a bit more sophisticated, thanks to tools like Urchin and WebTrends, and began talking about true visits—unique website user sessions—and measuring them with gusto. But these metrics really don't tell us much. We all know that now. The truth is that the volume of traffic a website receives is far less important than what those users do when they get there. That insight is what led Google Analytics to sweep us all off of our feet and begin our new romance with website data. By setting goals and coordinating them with website user actions, we could truly see if our investment in the web was paying off. We learned that measuring user engagement with a website's content is what really matters. But have we really learned it? I think we all believe we have. But my experience has been that, in order to tell the real story of what's going on with your website, you've got to do a bit more work than just tracking the numbers that Google Analytics provides to you in their pre-configured reports. You've got to create your own custom reports that answer the questions only you can ask—why you built your website in the first place, what you hope to achieve with it, and how you've nurtured it over time as your business has changed. Those are the fundamentals that should focus your measurement. This month, I want to go back to the basics, looking at the fundamental metrics of visits, referrers, bounce rate and conversions, in order to advance forward to a new level of measurement understanding. (By the way, in this article, I'm assuming you've set those goals and are already collecting data from them. If you haven't done that, go back and read some of our earlier articles on website measurement. If you have, read on...)  
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"...which means that the bounce rate is likely lower than you might initially conclude."
The rate doesn't ever change, it's a percentage, so it's always going to be that percentage. Google's conversion university people say that a bounce rate over 40% is problemmatic, probably why they put that metric front and center, right? It doesn't really matter how many people come to the page. If 40% of them are leaving, that's a problem. I like the analysis, but aren't you just creating a handicap?
Ed,
What I probably should have written is that the number of bounces is likely lower than you might initially conclude by seeing the percentage displayed next to the total number of visits. This is an important fact. Let's say the bounce rate is 50% for a page that received 2000 total unique visits. You would be wrong to conclude that 1000 visitors bounced. You would need to look at the landing page report to see how many visitors during the same time frame came in to your website by landing on that page. That is a different number, which will be less than the total number of visits. Let's say, again, hypothetically, that the number of landings was 300. This means that the number of bounces was actually 150, not 1000. A massive difference! That is my point.
So, no, I'm not trying to prescribe a handicap. In my opinion, bounce rate is only relevant when translated to a real number of visitors. Aiming for a percentage, like 40%, simply because other people say it's a good number is mistaken. There are too many different kinds of websites—of vastly different sizes—for that to be a realistic goal. A site like ours receives far too much traffic to a much-too-large number of unique pages for a site-wide bounce rate of 40% to be realistic. In fact, I might argue that the more content you create, no matter how focused you believe that content to be, the higher the site-wide bounce rate. There's far too much search engine traffic across the web for that not to be true. But we can debate that point...
In any case, you ended by saying that "it doesn't really matter how many people come to the page." I completely disagree. Concrete numbers do matter. Percentages don't. I want to know which visitors bounce and which convert, so the hard numbers matter. Looking simply at a percentage and saying, well, it's higher than 40%, therefore it's bad, is exactly the kind of "measurement" that I'm trying to steer our clients away from by writing this article.
Chris
Interesting article, seems you are losing visitors
edaviesc: We definitely are, and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. A couple of years ago, we began pursuing a goal to serve fewer clients at a higher level. This meant focusing our positioning and making sure that our marketing took its cues from that, rather than everything we could potentially talk about via various forms of content. This newly focused content strategy had an impact on the search engine optimization of our site, particularly as we focused on matching meta data to search intent. The end result, ideally, would be content that is more compelling to our prospects at the expense of some overall traffic attrition. After all, those higher visit numbers were supported by visitors that weren't prospects anyway.
Incidentally, Alan Beberwyck of Wanderlust, one of our agency partners, hit on this concept in an article he released just this morning. He's writing to the tourism industry, but his point about increasing the effectiveness of marketing by limiting the audience is indicative of this idea propagating across industries: I'm glad to see our industry, and the niches attached to it, moving toward a "doing more with less" mentality. And as I mentioned to Ed above, that is the kind of measurement we are encouraging our clients to be about: less concerned with traffic numbers as and end in themselves and more about the value of specific user engagement.
Thanks for this tutorial. What a great resource!
Truly fascinating stuff. But realistically, I'm left frustrated. If you can't get a clear picture from GA, then what good is it? I've always thought that the benefit of analytics tools like it was in saving people the time they'd otherwise spend rooting through piles of data by hand and filtering out conclusions. I don't have the time to do more than monitor our GA acct with the assumption that they're reports are the most important ones to pay attention to. I need to be able to quickly log in and just see whether or not the site is performing.
I'm putting this all together. My only question is about the point you made in the bounce rate section: "The more a user reads, the more likely they are to convert." If conversions come from deeper sessions, how do we get users to read more pages per visit?
@Ed, @Chris, @Jesse, I think one area of confusion with the whole bounce rate thread is that sitewide site bounce rate and individual page bounce rate are two very different things. (I'm linking to a marketing jive post that I found helpful), but for a smaller site like mine, my overall bounce rate matters more. For a larger site like this one, it's gonna be be higher because the overall rate is just an average of all the other pages' bounce rates.
The marketing jive post points out that a page's bounce rate is good or bad in terms of what the page's purpose is. A campaign landing page with a bounce rate over 35% is probably not good, but a blog post or something with the same rate would be doing just fine.
But the big point is you can't just look for a number and say good or bad. Page performance scales aren't binary systems, like on or off, 1 or 0. There has to be a deeper kind of thinking here, otherwise we're doing the same thing as teaching to the test.
Chris,
The part about this newsletter that I find to be most interesting is the idea you raise about the "Familiarity Spectrum." I think the idea of focusing one's online marketing efforts on the removed sources of trusted authority is a really brilliant one that is going to prove to be a pretty important principle of online marketing in the coming years. I look forward to hearing more about that in the future, and to Newfangled learning more about this directly through our marketing efforts.
In regard to the bounce rate thread, we've learned that quality is better than quantity. There has been a lot of content on our site that people found interesting and that did great with search engines but didn't really bring in people who were necessarily looking to hire a web developer. Chris's efforts have been very focused on writing content that is likely to bring more accurate prospects to our site, although we still love being an educational resource for anyone that might be interested. Chris has also removed a lot of the content on our site that brought in a ton of traffic, but was mostly one-off traffic.
@Jesse, one big way we've tried to get people to view more pages on our site is the "Related Content" widget you see on this page's sidebar. This has been successful for us, although we're always looking for more ways to further improve the site.
Great job, Chris, I really enjoyed reading this newsletter.
MaggieB: I'm glad it was helpful. Thanks, as always, for the compliment!
Alan Wynn: I understand. I think that the reality is that measurement worth doing is just more work than most people (myself included) realize. In fact, doing this assessment took much longer than I anticipated. But isn't that true of most things? Measurement is partly a methodical practice that you can allocate set amounts of time toward—particularly the gathering of data portion. But it's also a more research-like task that can be very difficult to estimate in terms of how much time you'll need to do it properly. The other thing to keep in mind is that a "deeper" assessment like the one I'm describing in this article wouldn't be necessary to do that frequently. It's more of a quarterly-level routine than a weekly or daily one. Your overall point though, is indicative of what I've observed among my own network: that measurement requires more time than most allocate. The larger the company/site, the more likely it is to be a full time role for an analyst. In light of your feelings though, I'd like to invoke some WWII-era British propaganda: "Keep Calm and Carry On."
Jesse: That's a very good question, and the answer is not a simple one. Sure, you've probably read things like "write quality content," but what does that mean? I think the more relevant question to ask (that I think will get you to where you want to be) is "Who are you trying to speak to?" The kind of content you need to create will naturally flow from that—actually identifying, based upon your company's positioning, who your prospects are and what they're looking to learn or hear from you. This process of persona development is something we've dealt with in past articles (How to Create Valuable Content and The Web Development Planning Process," as well as a recent webinar, "Using Personas to Build Better Websites"), so I'd encourage you to check those out. The functionality that Mark mentioned only works well because of a taxonomical structure behind the scenes that links this content based upon tags we apply to it, so theoretically, that related content should actually be directly related to what you're reading. It's not something that we manually override so that we can ensure that certain pages are seen more. That aside, I think that without doing the right planning work in terms of identifying your audience, there isn't really any mechanical way to increase the depth of your visitors' sessions that isn't manipulative in some way.
Alexandra: Yes, the distinction you raise is critical. For the most part, I'm talking about page-specific bounce rate in this article. Site-wide bounce rate, especially for a larger site with a widespread audience, is likely to be higher than 35-40%.
Mark: Glad you liked it—I aim to please ;-) I'm also interested in keeping an eye on the familiarity spectrum principle. This is something that I hit upon pretty recently, that seems to be pretty consistently true across various date ranges for which we have available data. However, I can't say for sure that it's true for everyone else, though I'm leaning toward thinking it is. We'll have to see. On that note, though, I'd be very interested in reader feedback on that point. Do you see the same trend or not?
Bounce Rates confuse me. Isnt the goal of every website for the visitor to take action - no matter what it is - pick up the phone, fill out a form, download a PDF, read the text provided...
If I have 10 visitors who all pick up the phone and call me and all 10 people exit my landing page so I have a 100% bounce rate - then why is this a bad thing ?? I think my job of providing quality content has succeeded and the visitor has taken my wanted action...
I find it hard to gauge too much importance into bounce rates if I continue to see user activity...
Really good post; a much-needed reality check for those who are stats-obsessed. Thanks for taking the time to explain this, because its a needed tutorial and admonition to get our priorities straight.
Russ: Exactly! All of this should be measured on the basis of conversions. As you say, the bounce rate becomes less and less important as the page's purpose remains fulfilled. You know, the working title for this article (until the day before I published it) was "Conversion-Focused Measurement"...
L.K.: I'm glad you appreciated the article. Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks for a very relevant post. As marketers we are faced with an often unreasonable demand for performance evidenced in stats. But since those holding us accountable for the evidence seem to have the wrong idea about what is actually worth measuring or considering relevant, we end up wasting our report opportunities qualifying our findings. This procedure is right on target with looking at the actually relevant data and not worrying about constantly increasing traffic.
One question remains. You've got me sold, but how would you go about changing the culture of expectation from the higher-ups?
Paul: Right on. I'm glad this article resonated with you. Your question is a good one, though I'm not sure I have a great answer for you. I think the best thing you can do is find ways to educate those who set the expectations, rather than try to manage them. Reframe the conversation by leading with data that is both pertinent and indicative of success. This way, you use positive feedback to encourage those around you to see the entire scheme of goals and measurement more realisticaly without any battles.
The other advice I have is to take that approach in small increments. Begin by pointing out conversions that are indicative of traffic sources or entire threads of activity that have so far been "invisible" to your superiors. Take a moment to do a quick demo of how applying an advanced segment can show that the value of smaller traffic sources can exceed larger ones. Congratulate those who have generated and nurtured leads that are most visible within your analytics.
I think you get the idea. It's not so much about flattery as it is about using positive affirmation to reframe the discussion and refocus the expectations. Otherwise, it's sure to become contentious. Good luck!