Vipul’s blog

Google has provided the advertisers and web site owners a very sound web analytics tool in the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides with a great insight into your campaigns and also provides all the supporting data for fine-tuning and perfecting these campaigns.

So, make sure you don’t forget to track this data. There are lot of metrics provided by Google Analytics. And below are few important ones which should of interest for any one:

• Bounce Rate
• Avg. Time on Site
• Page Views
• Goal and
• Funnel Visualization

For advertisers who are using Analytics in tandem with their AdWords Account, the process for tracking data is very simple. Google has an auto-tagging feature which will automatically add all the Adwords data into Google Analytics. But make sure you have enabled auto-tagging.

Auto-tagging can be enabled from Account tab. Auto-tagging makes sure Analytics has all the Adword data i.e. Camapign, AdGroup, Ad, and even Keyword level data.

Do share your experience of Google Adwords and Google Analytics integration.

Bounce Rate is a very important analytics metrics (often confused with Exit Rate!) and it is used in web traffic analysis.

A bounce happens when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without navigating to any other page on that site before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur.

Bounce Rate is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 seconds. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 seconds, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another bounce.

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits.

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website.

A visitor can bounce by:

• Closing an open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the website
• Session timeout
• Clicking on external link

There is always a misconception that higher bounce rate means bad site or poor site content where as It is always specific to the usability of a site e.g. a user on Google’s site would most likely click on external link so the bounce rate of Google’s site is supposed to be very high. Now, do you still think high bounce rate is bad for any site?

Do share your thoughts on this.