The Great and Powerful Google

Google sees more searches than Bing and Yahoo combined (Fleischner, 2013).

Gmail is the most popular email provider, with 900 million users around the world (Guynn, 2015).

Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics tool (Sparks, 2014).

Google-owned YouTube has more than 1 billion users, nearly one-third of all people on the Internet (YouTube Statistics, n.d.).

Don’t forget about Google Glass, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google+ and so, so much more.

Google is a powerhouse. The company has become so much a part of our lives, that we’ve turned its name into a verb – “Let me Google that.”

In 2009, a CNBC reporter spoke with then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt about privacy. “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend,” she said. “Should they?”

His response: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Google Analytics or GoSquared?

GoSquared is a web analytic tool that was created in 2006. Based in the UK, the company began when its three founders began working on the idea for a school project. The platform is focused on providing real-time customer analytics and is used around the world by thousands of businesses (1).

A demo, available here, shows just how different the service is from Google Analytics.

Check out the video below to see GoSquared in action.

Choosing social media platforms depends on a number of factors

A company should be present on multiple social media platforms. However, which ones depend on a number of factors. The company’s target audience, its goals and what type of company it is should all play a factor in the decision.

If a company is only on one social media platform, it should be Facebook. If it is on multiple social media platforms, one of those should be Facebook. The site is the most popular of all social media sites, with 71 percent of online adults using Facebook in 2014 (Duggan, Ellsion, Lampe, Lenhart & Madden, 2015). Other social media sites just do not have the same reach, and companies have the best chance of connecting with the most people on this platform.

Visitor Recency: Why it matters and how to measure it

Visitor recency tells how long it has been since a visitor last visited a website. Put in another way, it measures the gap between two visits from the same person. Websites may be updated every day, or multiple times a day, and visitor recency will show whether people are checking back to the site to see the updated information. This metric is important because it shows visitors’ commitment to the site. (Kaushik, 2010).

The best way to determine whether or not the visitor recency percentage of a website is adequate is by determining how often content is added to a website. If a website is updated every day, a marketer may want its visitors to visit the site just as often, to see the new content. The recency report can show what percentage of visitors have returned within a day or less.

This metric may be less vital to websites that are not updated frequently, or those that have longer buying cycles. For example, a college’s admissions website may not have a high percentage of visitors returning to the site each day, because they may be researching the school, looking at the application process and gathering all of the information they need to decide on whether or not to apply. For blogs or news sites, however, the goal is typically frequent engagement as there is frequently updated content, so recency is more beneficial as a PKI for this type of site (Thayer, n,d.).

To increase visitor recency, marketers should post links to their newest information on their social media accounts. Email campaigns and newsletters with fresh content, coupons and special offers can also drive frequency (Bateman, n.d.).

An example of a blog that may use the visitor recency metric is J’s Everyday Fashion. The blog is updated almost every day with new fashion advice, sales, daily outfits and other fashion-related news.

To keep visitors coming back, the blogger posts updates to her social media accounts every day, with links to the full post on her website. She also sends out emails every day, like the one below, which can be clicked to go to the blog post as well.

Another way visitor recency can be useful is to measure the success of a campaign in a more long-term way. For example, a social media website runs a campaign in hopes of gaining more users, and the result is 500,000 new signups. While the campaign may look successful at face value, visitor recency can be used to take a closer look. By waiting 30 days and looking at the visitor recency report for visitors that came to the site as a result of the campaign, a marketer can see the behavior of those new members (Kaushik, 2009).

Have they visited the site within the last day or so? Or have they not visited since they signed up? As shown in the example above, 30 days after the campaign, nearly 77 percent of those who signed up during the campaign visited the site 30 days later, which shows that many of those new members are engaging with the site and find it relevant to them. If, however, 30 days after the campaign, if only a small percentage of visitors had re-visited the site for the first few days, then the campaign may not have been as successful as it may have looked judging solely on signups (Kaushik, 2009). In other words, although the campaign may have created more “members” to the site, it may not have created more actual “users” of the site.

References:

Bateman, S. (n.d.). Frequency and recency climb with the right drivers [blog post]. Retrieved online from http://www.promisemedia.com/organic-marketing/increase-web-site-traffic-with-frequency-drivers.

Kaushik, A. (2009, Jan. 21). Excellent analytics tips #15: Measure latent conversions & visitor behavior [blog post]. Retrieved online from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-15-measure-latent-conversions-visitor-behavior/.

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Thayer, S. (n.d.). Visitor recency – how long has it been since they’ve come back? [blog post]. Retrieved online from http://www.trendingupward.net/2010/12/visitor-recency/. 

Why is Bounce Rate so important?

Bounce rate, often lauded as the most important web metric, is a visit that consists of only one page being viewed (Reed College, 2015). When a website is viewed and then left, without any other clicks on the site, it is known as a bounce. This can be measured in aggregate, as in the percentage of all website visitors who visited a page on the website and left, or it can be measured for any individual page on the website. (Kaushik, 2010).

Four main scenarios register as a bounce. They include a user:

• clicking the back button
• closing the browser window or tab
• typing a new URL
• or just doing nothing, since a session typically times out after 30 minutes (Kelly, 2012).

Bounce rate can also help identify problems on a website. For example, a high bounce rate could mean that a website has a poor design that seems confusing or unappealing to visitors, such as sites with video ads that auto-play, or the load time may be too high and visitors don’t want to wait (Ledgard, n.d.). Another issue that a high bounce rate could discover is that a website is attracting the wrong people. For example, a visitor may have used a search engine to search for shoes to buy. After clicking a link, the visitor may realize that a particular site just reviews shoes and doesn’t sell them. The website may need to reevaluate what keywords it uses and how it advertises itself in order to attract visitors who are looking for what the website actually offers (Ledgard, n.d.).

The bounce rate can also help marketers with measuring the effectiveness of an email campaign. For example, an email might tell subscribers about an exciting new product that company’s website is now offering. A large percent of people may click the link in the email to the product’s webpage, but then may exit that page without clicking anything else. This high bounce rate may be an indication that the email does not accurately describe what is offered on the web page. A look at the bounce rate in this situation might alert marketers to an issue with content or a call to action (Kaushik, 2010).

While marketers strive for a low bounce rate, sometimes a high bounce rate is acceptable. For example, blogs might have a high aggregate bounce rate, because visitors might come to the website to read the latest blog post, then leave. To get a better measure on bounce rates in this scenario, Kaushik recommends measuring bounce rate for new visitors instead. New visitors may sign up for a newsletter, or read the page’s “about the author section,” which show engagement and may make them repeat visitors (Kaushik, 2010). Another page that might have a high bounce rate is a “contact us” page. Visitors may click to the page to find a business’s address or phone number. In this case, the page did its job and a high bounce rate is not a bad thing (Kelly, 2012).

Marketers can improve bounce rate by using A/B testing. A/B testing is when one of two or more versions of a page are randomly shown to page visitors. The goal is to see which version delivered the desired outcome, or a lower bounce rate in this case. The pages could vary in many ways, including layout, color, different elements, and a multitude of other ways (Kaushik, 2010).

For example, MedaliaArt used A/B testing to see which version of these two home pages would have a lower bounce rate. Version 1 had a large banner promoting the holiday sale, while Version 2 displayed the holiday sale information much smaller and in a sidebar (Chopra,.

Version 1

Version 2

The company worried that the large promotional message would irritate visitors, but the test showed that Version A had a much lower bounce rate (Chopra, 2010).

In this case, there were not a lot of changes between the pages, but pages that have many differing elements make A/B testing more difficult, because marketers can’t know which elements made one of the two pages more effective. However, A/B testing is a simple way to test how successful a page is, and the results may be surprising (Kaushik, 2010).

References:

Chopra, P. (2010, Jan. 7). Using A/B split testing to reduce bounce rate by 20% for an eCommerce store [blog post]. Retrieved online from https://vwo.com/blog/using-ab-split-testing-reduce-bounce-rate-ecommerce-store/.

Ledgard, J. (n.d.). Bounce rate: 14 ways you are driving people away from your landing pages [blog post]. Retrieved online from https://kickofflabs.com/blog/bounce-rate-14-ways-you-are-driving-people-away-from-your-landing-pages/.

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Kelly, K. (2012, Feb. 12). What is bounce rate? Avoid common pitfalls [blog post].  Retrieved online from http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/what-is-bounce-rate.

Reed College of Media. (2015). Lesson 2: Basic Web Metrics. West Virginia University. Retrieved online from ecampus.wvu.edu.