Is Your Client Obsessed with Google Analytics?

By / September 14, 2009 /

By Josh Oakhurst

Tell them to relax.

In the hunt for ROI, too many website owners are tripped up on the false notion solely lowering their “bounce rate” is all that stands between their business model and vast riches. We’ve encountered a lot of clients who place a low bounce rate on a web execution as proxy for success—which it most definitely is not. There are lots of great, ROI-heavy deployments your agency may produce that end up with what appear to be a scary bounce rate tied to the URL.

But because Google Analytics has seemingly made web traffic monitoring idiot proof, a lot of expectation management and defining of terms must go into handling a client who thinks Google’s data is the absolute measurement of your site’s effectiveness.
Understanding bounce rate is important for your agency because you are only doing more work online, not less (or should be), your AE’s are getting calls asking about this “analytics stuff”, and your new business team is likely going to encounter prospects who think they need your services for one task and one task only.

What’s a bounce rate?

There are several “exact” definitions of bounce rate around the web; here’s mine:

Bounce rate is the calculation of visits to a website requesting only one page call to the server DIVIDED BY the total number of visits resulting in multiple calls.

But what happens when a website can serve up multiple PAGES during one PAGE CALL? There are many, still, SEO friendly and standards based deployment tactics that can nullify the bounce rate measurement as useless. For a recent example:

We recently just launched for a client specializing in high-end loft leasing.

Of the five content areas (pages individually requiring a call to the server), all are loaded at once (one page call). This enables the fancy scrolling function afforded by the navigation and also reduces the time it takes the viewer to receive additional information on the property when going further than the home “page.” Luxury residential leasing in major markets is a crowded web category, so all the frustrations we can reduce for the browsing shopper, the better. Even if the saved time result is in milliseconds, the effect of the navigation is pleasing and can result in some interesting design interactions. It’s subtle (and basic), but the navigation ties directly into the brand’s larger strategy of elegance and quality.

However, one of the consequences of loading all five pages from the outset is that it produces a completely irrelevant bounce rate metric. And we knew that going into the build. For our needs, the % of new visits, average time on site, and server logs showing total numbers of .pdf dowloads (floorplans and applications) give us a much better, and much more accurate, description of this website’s effectiveness.

Which brings me to another point—even for a traditional page loading execution, the bounce rate metric is overrated. Not waaaaaay overrated, just over-emphasized, over-scrutinized, and taken as being an absolute, stand alone representation that it absolutely is not.

I’m not being semantic; “bounce rate” is an incorrect term. “Bounce” is an inference; an assumption of users’ behavior based on data (data it should be noted, that has a not-insignificant margin of error.) To that end, “average time on site” can be problematic, as well, since it would be better called average time user left browser window open, with an eventual timeout threshold (of which is unclear how said timeout affects average time calculation).

New web masters—your clients ,should you give them that power, can’t be faulted for putting hefty stock in these data calculations. People have been looking at website server logs for a long time trying to figure out how to interpret the data; Goggle, with their analytics platform estimated to pervade over 80% of all sites in the world, just came up with a really slick way to package and present that data. Their contribution to data visualization cannot be understated.

And it’s good for you to be able to speak with your clients about this data. It doesn’t require a separate monthly retainer just for you to watch their analytics (though it could), but often times certain information drawn from analytics can lead to you selling in a new idea, or a new market, or a new execution—tailored differently, and their read of the data can give you a point of casual conversation.

But the power of Google Analytic’s data is relative, and each website needs individual evaluation based on the owner’s needs, wants, the site’s architecture, the industry category, and main marketing methods to determine which, of all possible analytic measurements, are most important to evaluating website performance. No number is absolute, and no number should be taken on its own without further cross reference.

If I haven’t been clear, just know that SEO slime-balls will sell your client any service or product they can mask with smoke and mirrors. Arbitrarily dropping their bounce rate is one of them—and it’s a metric that can be changed systematically, but this can often be in contradiction, or completely divorced from your thoughtful web strategy. And if your design/programming team is told from the outset, “This site must always, and only, maintain a 35% bounce rate,” you’re crippling them.

In short, relevant web traffic is much more than the opposite of whatever a URL’s bounce rate might be. The analysis of analytics is still an art form, and ultimately, requires an opinionated read of the data to be truly useful. Though your clients can (and should) access this data on their own, you—still—remain the expert based on your experience reading not just the data from their site, but also from hundreds (or tens) of other sites, brands, and strategies for which you are the steward.

Therefore, despite the masses’ access to the tools, you still have valuable services worth retaining.

Josh Oakhurst is the Interactive Producer for Nail in Providence. He used to make a bunch of TV and websites in Colorado, and he is still sad about blowing out his ACL at Breck.