High Bounce Rates Can Be Good
Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive wrote in his blog (Conversation Marketing) that “A higher bounce rate is bad. A lower one is good.“. Overall, that post is a good one and your bounce rate should be considered with the rest of your user metrics but I don’t believe it can have the weight that Ian’s post implies it should have.
Two Reasons Why A High Bounce Rate Can Be Good
1. How long did that person stay on the page before bouncing? Most popular Analytics packages (Google Analytics) have a problem – the average time a user spends on a page, given that it is the only page they land on, is not recorded. I would say that an average of 15 to 20 minutes on a page with detailed instructions that drive somebody to a form of action that is not a click through the site is extremely successful even though the bounce rate would be almost 100%. A good example is our NUDE series posts – we receive 100+ visits to those every day and the bounce rate is around 90%…I haven’t implemented the fix I linked to a couple sentences ago but I do have a live chat program that let’s me view the footprint of a visitor and the time they spent on that particular page. The average time spent on those pages is around 12 minutes and I’m certain that those visitors walked away with something very engaging and valuable. At least I like to think they got something valuable out of it. 
2. Advertised landing pages can have a high bounce rate and a high conversion rate. This will require some testing on your part but we have found that taking away some or all of the main navigation on a landing page will give the user two options – convert or leave. In our tests, for some of our clients – not all of them, removing most of the navigation on a landing page tripled or quadrupled conversion rates! We will often start with a 2% conversion rate and end up with an 8% or 10% conversion rate with the other 90% bouncing off the page. Even if you had an extremely high overall conversion rate of 30 – 40%, your bounce rate would still be 60 – 70% for that particular page.
We can conclude that given different circumstances, you might consider a high bounce rate good or bad but it is never truly definitive as a whole…it is definitive for parts of the whole as demonstrated in our post.
Read MoreGoogle Analytics Auto-Tagging Issues
Ian Lurie at Portent Interactive wrote about Analytics having auto-tagging issues earlier this week – I believe the issue started around January 9.
It looks like the problem was resolved around January 14 but if you tried implementing the AdWords keyword Data Exposed through Google analytics trick last week and it didn’t work, I recommend giving it another shot because the problem was probably Google Analytics auto-tagging.
Getting Conversion Data With Your New Analytics Profile
A few people emailed/posted a great question about finding the conversion data with the new filters you added to your Google Analytics profiles we discussed in our PPC Management series. Here you go:
(These instructions start after you are logged into your Analytics profile of choice…)
If You DO NOT Use Goals -
1. Click on Content.
2. Then click on Top Content.
3. Find your conversion page and click on it…you will get a bunch of fantastic stats about that page.
(Click the image above to see a bigger picture…)
4. Drop down the Segment menu and choose Keyword (directly underneath and to the right of the bold sentence “This page was viewed **** times“).
If You USE Goals!
1. Click on Traffic Sources.
2. Then click on Keywords.
3. Click on a detailed keyword.
4. Finally, click on Goal Conversion – you can see the keyword conversion rate, number of conversions, and my favorite: the Per Visit Goal Value for that specific keyword!
Now you can review all the specific keywords that converted from AdWords!
PPC Management: AdWords Keyword Data Exposed With Google Analytics!
Introducing our QualityScores PPC Management series where we expose some of the best ppc management
secrets ever!
_______________________________________
You CAN expose your specific AdWords Keyword Data beyond the dreaded “other unique queries” in the AdWords Search Query Report with Google Analytics!
Don’t you hate running the AdWords Search Query report because you know the best data is behind the cold words “other unique queries”?
Do you have a sick feeling in your gut because you know you can make more money with your affiliate programs, blogs, and ads if you could only tighten up your AdWords advertising?
If you answered “yes”, then you need to read and implement this Analytics secret immediately.
Here is a detailed, step by step process to take a look at what lies beneath the silky covers of “other unique queries” using Google Analytics:
1. Log into AdWords and click on My Account -> Account Preferences:
2. Find the Tracking section in Account Preferences and make sure Auto-tagging is set to “yes”:
3. Click on Analytics from your AdWords account or sign into your Google Analytics account:
4. You can choose to skip this step if you want to edit your current website Analytics profile – we recommend you create a separate profile. Click on Add Website Profile >>:
5. Choose to add a profile to an existing domain:
6. Pick your domain, label the profile, make sure you have a check mark in the Apply Cost Data section and click finish:
7. You should see your new profile listed with any other profiles you already have:
8. Now you need to edit the settings of your new profile – Click on Edit next to your new profile:
Analytics Filter 1
9. Find the Filters Applied to Profile section and click Add Filter:
10. Choose to Add new Filter for Profile:
11. Give your filter a good name, drop down to the Custom Filter type and choose the Advanced option:
12. In Field A -> Extract A choose the Referral drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
(\?|&)(q|p|query|kw|searchfor|wd)=([^&]*)
I’ll update the image later – but the q|p…etc will effectively pull almost all queries from the url at the serp. Each search engine uses a different url parameter for this so if you find one you want to track, simply add it to the regex above using the bar | to separate them. The above regex was copied from the search lab.
13. In Field B -> Extract B choose the Campaign Medium drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
cpc|ppc
14. In Output To -> Constructor choose the Custom Field 1 drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
$A3
15. Make sure all fields are required and they do not need to be case sensitive, then click Finish:
16. You should be back on the profile settings page where you can see this first filter has been applied to your detailed analytics profile.
Analytics Filter 2
17. Repeat steps 9 through 11 to create a second filter. Remember to give the second filter a different name and give this filter the attributes outlined in steps 18 through 21. ***You NEED both filters for detailed keyword data to work!***
18. In Field A -> Extract A choose the Custom Field 1 drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
(.*)
19. In Field B -> Extract B choose the Campaign Term drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
(.*)
20. In Output To -> Constructor choose the Campaign Term drop down and copy and paste this code into the available field -
$B1, ($A1)
Some replicated posts detail using $B1, $A1 without parenthesis – and I haven’t seen any difference in results so it appears either way should work fine.
21. Make sure all fields are required and they do not need to be case sensitive, then click Finish:
22. You should be back on the profile settings page where you can see this second filter has been applied to your detailed analytics profile. Make sure they are in the order we described – filter 1 should be listed BEFORE filter 2 under the Filters Applied to Profile section.
You are done setting up the secret that will expose your AdWords Keyword Data!
Now you need to wait a few hours for the data to be captured and reported. When you revisit Analytics you simply need to look at these reports and note the added data next to your AdWords keywords:
Traffic Sources -> Keywords
- or -
Traffic Sources -> AdWords -> Keyword Positions
Or a number of other reports…
The data in your old Analytics profile should look like this:
And the data in your new profile should look like this:
The keywords shown in parentheses (key+word) is the exact term the user searched when they found and clicked on your advertisement.
This particular client is only selling home security systems so I would look at this report and add “car” as a negative keyword and I would research “home security devices” to see if there is a decent volume for that term. Then I would consider optimizing a page for that term and add the keyword to my AdWords campaign to see if I can turn those visitors into the kind of visitor that puts money in my wallet.
One note regarding GOALS
We published a post detailing how to see your keyword data for Goals/conversions. Enjoy!
That’s a wrap! Your AdWords Keyword Data is now EXPOSED!
Our source for learning and applying this secret to our client accounts and our own accounts comes from a November 2007 blog post by the GA-Experts. Thank you, GA-Experts, for sharing this secret with us!
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