WavyBrainy

Bounce rate: It’s the Biggy

Talking up your web site’s traffic has become a testosterone charged tradition wherever marketing types gather. While consistent traffic growth over time is certainly impressive, a snapshot in time of a website’s traffic is essentially meaningless. For one it’s relative to market size. A site in a super niche market, e.g. weightlifting equipment for physicists, may do quite well with a 1000 unique visitors per month, while a major consumer site like Coke could be withering on the vine with a million visits.

Traffic says nothing about what visitors do when they come to your site, whether they are likely to return, or how effective the marketing was that got them in the first place.

That’s why we like to zero in on bounce rate. Like P/E ratio, it’s a measure of efficiency. In one tidy number, bounce reveals the ability of your site’s content, marketing, usability and technical performance to suck in visitors and hold them prisoner.

The high cost of bouncing customers out of your site.

Google defines bounce rate as the number of people who leave your site after viewing a single page. High bounce will hit you in the wallet, too. Although the source may be a relatively small technical problem, it’s wiping out the marketing, content, design and programming investment made in that specific page.

In the real world, it’s like investing in an ad campaign to drive customers to a new mall store called “World of Botox.” Hundreds of coupon clutching customers show up, but 89% of them just peer in the shop window and leave.

In web terms this is an excessive and unacceptable bounce rate. Bounce rate measures the efficiency of a web page. Based on advertising, web marketing and search results, visitors approach your site with a defined set of needs and wants. When they aren’t met in a few seconds, most will leave.

High bounce rates drop web site ROI like a stone. If the bounce rate on any of the key pages of your site, especially the home page, is hovering around 50%, it time to move to Devcon 5.

How to determine your site’s bounce rate.

Any respectable web analytics package will report the bounce rate of all the pages in your site. Sort the report from highest to lowest, paying particular attention to critical pages like:

• Your home page.
• Any page with an important form, especially a multi-part form.
• eCommerce pages and checkout funnels
• Any page that you’ve targeted for a transaction, e.g. white paper download.

Keep in mind that some pages will naturally have a very high bounce rate, like “Thank you” pages and privacy pages.

The pathology of bouncing

There are a number of potential reasons for high bounce rates, and sometimes they exist in combination. Though solving a high bounce rate test may take some research and diagnostic work, spotting the issues is mainly a matter of common sense.

For example, speed. If there’s a line around the block to get into the World of Botox, only the most dire cases will wait. The same goes for your website. Except the web is more unforgiving. If your page doesn’t load in a few seconds, 70% of your visitors are already Googling or Binging the competition.

Lack of instantly recognizable relevant content will also keep your customers bouncing. What if, for example, all the wrinkly World of Botox customers show up only to find the store’s window packed with vitamins and cosmetics. When your site doesn’t deliver the goods as promised in advertising or a search description, you’ve broken a pact and possibly turned off a user forever.

At the top of our bounceability list is speed, or lack thereof. Depending on the speed your customers are connecting to the internet, most will only wait one or two seconds for a page to load. The most common problems are large graphics, animations and videos.

Visitors to your site may not understand how your page is organized, or where to find what they want. Key links may use unclear wording, e.g. “Our Happy Place” instead of “About.”; the type size is too small; the placement isn’t logical. A simple usability test will quickly uncover these issues.

One of the underlying causes of high bounce rate is a failure to match your products and services to specific landing pages within your site. Navigating a website isn’t like strolling through Walmart. Most of us expect to click and instantly arrive at the meat counter. The home page can’t do it all, especially if your offerings are diverse or have audiences with little crossover. The solution is to develop landing pages or even mini sites designed around specific customer needs.

High Bounce Rate Causes and Solutions

Slow Load Time

• Shrink image sizes and optimize code.
• Nuke pokey Flash apps.
• Is your server the culprit? Run a speed test.
• Check load time of pages with high bounce rates.

Content

• Make sure that the content of the page is clearly summarized in instantly visible and crystal clear headlines, and subheads.
• Add additional pages or sections to bring more focus to content structure.
• Clean up design clutter, set copy for readability.
• Edit copy for conciseness.

Marketing

• Make sure the advertising or search ads match the content of the targeted page. If not, turn off the ad, or point it at a more appropriate page.
• Develop landing pages focused on a single topic.

One of our motto’s at Ideopia is “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” Perhaps nothing fits this category better than blogs on corporate web sites. They can be hideous, pumped full of hype and hard sell, or they can be funny, chock full of useful content and make you love a brand even more. In that spirit, we offer a few observations that might help you decide to blog, or not to blog.

Do blog if you want to:
1. Entertain a small group of friends and your mother
2. Communicate and engage customers
3. Demonstrate expertise on key issues
4. Build search rankings for your site on specific business areas
5. Convert prospects and leads on the blog
6. Share information and ideas within your company
7. Make your brand come to life
8. Be open to opinions other than your own
9. Want a book deal

Don’t blog if you:
1. Need to control information flow
2. Value a corporate voice versus personality on your blog
3. Won’t accept negative comments
4. Want to broadcast instead of have a conversation
5. Just want to sell and market your services
6. Don’t have specific goals for your blog
7. Think your blog can outsmart Google
8. If you expect the same audience for your web site as your blog
9. Want a book deal

Sooner or later someone will visit your website, click on a link, and get the dreaded “Error 404 ‘your site was programmed by drunken monkeys’ Page Not Found” message. It turns out that designing friendly and funny Error 404 pages has become a cottage industry. Mepholio.com and 10steps.sg have cataloged some of the best and most beautiful. We think these pages are great PR, but most of them don’t include any additional tools, e.g. a search function that actually help users find the non Error 404 page they’re looking for.

Infographic created by CNN during President Obama's March 24, 2009, press conference.

Infographics, contrary to urban legend, were not invented by USA Today. One of the most famous infographics created by Charle’s Minard in 1885 depicts the failure and eventual retreat of Napolean’s army in Russia by correlating time, temperature, and mortality rates. (For stunning contemporary examples, visit visualcomplexity.com) Infographics allow us to visualize hundreds and even hundreds of thousand of data points, so we can see patterns, extract information and make decisions. Cloud navigation found on many blogs and websites shows key words that represent content. In turn the size of the word may communicate popularity or the amount of underlying content. This allows us to understand very quickly what a site is about without a single click of the mouse. Aside from keeping innovative designers off the dole for the near future, infographics are a survival mechanism that keeps us from drowning in a sea of data. Use them!

1. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte

KosherHam.com is an irreverent, in-your-face online t-shirt company that drives its
business through social marketing and its vibrant online fan base.
Jeremy Bloom, president of Kosher Ham, explains how it works in 140
character responses in our first Twitterview.

@Ideopia: Question #1 What’s a “kosher” ham?

@KosherHam: 1)”kosher” ham…first and foremost -1) the bacon that’s been blessed.
2) the pinnacle of all oxymorons. 3) funny Jews. 4) Funny
t-shirt/clothing company featuring pop-culture and Jewish humor

@Ideopia: How do you use Twitter in your marketing?

@KosherHam:
We find people that are interested in the same themes/topics and then
send ‘em an @reply (or a poke - Facebook terms) to get attention

@KosherHam:
Twitter is great for additional branding, seo/sem, finding potential
customers/fans, and networking w/ marketing & t-shirt geeks

@KosherHam: We also promote coupon codes exclusive to Twitter followers. We like Facebook more. 140 characters is too short sometimes.

@Ideopia: What is your all-time best selling t-shirt?

@KosherHam:
crowd-pleasers: Rick Astley Pie-chart, Barack’n tee (’09 sales r
sleepy), 30-Rock & the Golden Girls “ultimate conquest” themed-tee.

@KosherHam: Our/my favorite - Kosher Ham logo tees. It gives me warm-fuzzies when people buy the logo tee across the country.

Read more at KosherHam.com and see the KosherHam’s Spring Collection.

Follow Ideopia’s Bill Abramovitz on Twitter @Ideopia and Jeremy Bloom @KosherHam.

Join Ideopia’s mailing list.

Is Your Current Ad Agency a Bit Stale?
40+ Years of experience and fresh ideas to help focus your marketing.
www.some_real_ad_agency.com

I was checking out our search placements yesterday, and I came across this hilarious ad from another agency. The combined years of experience gambit is common with many services companies. It seemed particularly funny here, because it was linked with “freshness.” Besides, we all know companies out there that defy Darwinistic logic to survive even though they totally suck. Also, are we talking one, old dude here, or 40 interns? C’mon guys, it’s the intertube era. What can you do for me now?

While most people are hunkering down during the recession, others are going hog wild. Witness the Bacon Explosion phenomenon featured on the BBQ Addicts web site. It’s like waiting for the bomb to drop during the cold war. You can put aluminum foil over your head and huddle under the desk, or you can thatch together 2 pounds of bacon, wrap it around 2 pounds of sausage, slather the whole mess in barbecue sauce, and tell your cardiologist where to stick the 500 grams of fat. According to the New York Times, 16,000 web sites are linking to the recipe. Maybe the good old days of excess are closer to coming back than we think.

Janine Benyus shows off biomicry (design from nature) in this top-rated youTube video.

Integrating web sites, landing pages and emails into your trade show plans is a very cost-effective way to build excitement, identify hot prospects, and schedule your staff’s time in the booth. A few ideas we’ve used successfully include:

1. Email and web promotions related to a new product that requires redemption at the trade show booth.
2. Scheduling in-person demos online and capturing mobile messaging information to send reminders.
3. Multi-part teaser campaigns - sometimes prohibitively expensive in print - that create buzz for new products.
4. Product specific landing pages that prospects can visit after the show. Downloadable information and video demos keep your brand top of mind, and out of the trash.
5. Rapid and customized email follow-ups to everyone who visits the booth.
6. Search and/or banner advertising scheduled around show assets.

Would you buy a bottle of wine from this hairy humanoid?

I admit it. I am a Neanderthal when it comes to wine. I like my vino cheap, and I make my decisions based on cool graphics and interesting names more than woodsy aftertaste. This is how I came in possession of a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon ($4.99) from Sasquatch Cellars. Afterall, who better to be an expert vintner than a large, hairy humanoid.

Brand myths, like Sasquatch, can differentiate products in a commodity market. Add a clever back story, which Sasquatch Wine Cellars takes a shot at, can capture a loyal and profitable cult following. Presumably the tin foil hat crowd in Sasquatch’s case. Here’s the upshot: when you uncork your Cabernet for a romantic evening, it cannot smell and taste like benzene. It doesn’t matter how sturdy and robust the marketing is if the product stinks.