Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate

Bounce Rate

The definition of Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that hit your website on a given page and don’t visit any other pages on your site. For example, John views an organic search listing, clicks through to your site, and then leaves your site without visiting any other pages.

Exit Rate

The definition of Exit Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page (or pageviews in some cases). Sounds similar to Bounce Rate, doesn’t it? There’s a difference, though. The visitor who exits might have visited other pages on your site, but just exited on that specific page. For example, John views an organic search listing, clicks through your site, reads a blog post, then clicks the About Us link. After finding out more about your company, John clicks the contact us link and fills out a contact form. He then exits your site. The contact us page is where he exited. In contrast, if he simply visited the site via organic search and left without visiting any other page, it would have been a bounce.

Why are Bounce Rate and Exit Rate Important?

Both metrics are important and can help web marketing people glean insights from the data, but they are definitely used differently. Bounce Rate is extremely important for determining how your landing pages perform as compared to visitor expectations. For example, if you run paid search campaigns, then you know the importance of testing a landing page (optimizing the landing page). I find that bounce rate at the aggregate level doesn’t tell you very much (site level bounce rate), but I find that bounce rate at the page level is extremely useful. It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. For example, if you are driving paid search visitors to your landing page selling Coffee Makers {OK, it’s 5AM and I’m tired }, and you have a 70% Bounce Rate on that page, you’ve got a problem. Why are that many visitors bouncing after clicking through your paid search ad and landing on a page that theoretically should be highly targeted? This is actually the fun part…digging into the data, optimizing the page, and using multivariate testing to lower your bounce rate and to increase conversion. As you can see, bounce rate can help you determine how well your landing pages perform (which directly affects revenue and ROAS).

 

Ref: http://www.hmtweb.com/blog/2007/08/bounce-rate-and-exit-rate-what-is.html

Google Android executive joined Coupons.com

Steve Horowitz, engineering director of Google’s Android project to build a Linux-based open-source phone operating system, has left the company to become chief technology officer of Coupons.com.

“The company is at a pivotal point in its business, and I am eager to help further advance its development and deployment of new platforms and services for digital promotions,” Horowitz said in a statement Tuesday.

Coupons.com offers coupons online. Using its technology, people printed coupons worth more than $300 million in 2008, up 140 percent from 2007, the company said, but it’s not clear how many people actually used them.

Ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10145890-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

IBM to buy Chinese e-mail company

Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire a Chinese e-mail and messaging company.

Hong Kong-based firm Outblaze sells hosted multilingual e-mail and messaging services for other service providers, telecommunications companies, and corporations to operate under their own brands.

Outblaze will become part of IBM Lotus’ Bluehouse project, IBM’s online-business and social-networking and collaboration service, IBM announced on Thursday. Bluehouse is currently in open beta testing.

“The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus’ commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions, and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement,” Bob Picciano, the general manager of IBM Lotus Software, said in a statement.

Security experts warned that companies considering moving to hosted e-mail services in developing countries should think about where their data will reside, and choose their provider carefully. A report last week warned that emerging markets such as China are at greater risk of cyber crime, while the U.S. government warned in November that the Chinese government was using advanced cyberespionage techniques.

“With any hosted service, you have to do due diligence, look at the system and how it’s being managed,” said Andy Buss, a senior analyst at Canalys.

Buss recommended that businesses either use a trusted local company or one of the trusted larger providers, such as IBM, for hosted messaging services. The analyst added that as more workers start to rely on online tools, companies have to work out how to integrate tools and work flows.

Pref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10145809-92.html

Obama inauguration traffic not good for everyone

While dozens of social and media Web sites saw high or record traffic on President Obama’s Inauguration Day, not all Web sites shared the wealth. At least one commercial online hosting service saw its customers take a beating during the ceremony. MerchantCircle (review), which hosts small business Web sites, saw a dramatic drop in traffic to its sites. Once the meat of the inauguration started to wind down, though, it looks like people went back to their usual browsing and buying behaviors.

Traffic to MerchantCircle sites spiked downward during the inauguration ceremony.
(Credit: MerchantCircle)

Ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10146798-2.html

Google kills off print advertising project

Yet another sign Google is getting serious about cost-cutting: It is dropping its efforts to sell print advertising in newspapers. In a blog post put up this afternoon, the company says it will drop its Print Ads product at the end of February.

One sign that Google (GOOG) isn’t getting desperate about cost-cutting: I’m told no employees will lose their jobs as a result of the decision.

Back in Google’s go-go growth years it seemed inevitable that the company would expand its killer search ad platform to other media: It would tackle print, radio and television.

But none of these expansions has taken hold yet: Google’s move into radio, via the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, has gone nowhere. And its efforts to sell TV time have been more or less limited to an experiment with Echostar’s Dish Network. But the company did sign a pact with GE’s (GE) NBC last fall.

The move comes in the wake of Google’s announcement that it was laying off up to 100 recruiters and chopping a handful of no-impact programs like Dodgeball. It wouldn’t be a shock to see even more programs dropped in the near future.

And now for a trip down memory lane, all the way back to July 18, 2007, courtesy of Digital Daily:

Encouraged by the latest results of Google Print Ads, a service that allows advertisers to buy traditional newspaper space in 50 national and local papers, the company is expanding it to include 225 newspapers. Together those publications have a combined circulation of almost 30 million and serve all but three of the top 35 media markets, which could be a compelling proposition to the hundreds of thousands of Google AdWords users who are now eligible to purchase ad space in them. ‘We believe newspapers are a critical component in the marketing ecosystem,’ Spencer Spinnell, head of sales strategy for Google Print Ads, told the New York Times. ‘More than 50% of adults read newspapers every day, and marketers are always trying to reach new customers. It’s always a great multiplier effect when marketers think holistically both offline and online.’

Spinnell said Google still wants to find a way to help the ailing journalism trade.

"We remain dedicated to working with publishers to develop new ways for them to earn money, distribute and aggregate content, and attract new readers online," he said. "We will continue to devote a team of people to look at how we can help newspaper companies. It is clear that the current Print Ads product is not the right solution, so we are freeing up those resources to try to come up with new and innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers, and publishers."

Ref: http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090120/another-google-product-killed-print-ads-no-one-wanted/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10146065-93.html