“I really want to download that song,” my anti-war teenager whispered to me in the darkened theater. We were watching the (almost mandatory) music video about the National Guard that is showing here in the US on every screen, before every movie, it seems.

“Don’t you care that it’s about the US military?” I whispered back, incredulously.

“No,” she whispered in reply, “I just care that 3 Doors Down did it.”

Today is the end of the holiday weekend, and as she was getting ready to go back to school, I asked her if she had downloaded it. “I didn’t,” she answered, “They wanted my name and my email address. I’m just the right age, I’m sure they’ll try to recruit me. I’ll get a ton of spam from them.” I pointed out that she could easily just create an alternative email account and not worry about the spam. Which is exactly what she did.

The National Guard is really foolish. They have spent an incredible amount of money getting a truly great music video on movie screens nationwide. But instead of putting a wall in front of it (stopping lots and lots of people), they should give it away without asking for names. And they should make not just the music, but also the video, available for download (I only found the streaming video available.) It’s a great recruiting piece, and instead of stopping the conversion, they should let people take it and watch it and watch it. Isn’t that what you want, all your potential customers putting your advertising on their iPods? The US National Guard has that opportunity, but left as it is - email address required - lots of people will just leave the page (I’d like to see that page’s exit rate - I notice that they use Google Analytics), and plenty of others will just use an alternate address. One they will never look at again.

Now, that would make a great split test - because all that should matter is whether they get enough recruits…

So, I hit the wrong button and deleted this whole post. And I have never been so busy in my life. All I want to do is go lay down and sleep. So here is my post again on the 100% bounce rate, we’ll see if I know anything about WordPress slugs and if I can actually replace that page, or if it’s htaccess to the rescue…

My cell phone rang and I paused Grey’s Anatomy. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the voice on the other end of the line said, “It must be evening out there on the East Coast.” He was the nicest guy in the world, with a really good business idea. And while we were talking, he asked me, “Why is my GA bounce rate 100%?”

I love problems like this. They are so black and white that the answers are almost always technical (and not human. We humans are messy.) So I instructed, “Tell me how many unique pages your analytics showed on the day when you had a 100% bounce rate. It’s on the left navigation, go to Content > Top Content.”

“Gee,” he said, “I can only see two pages. That can’t be right, we have hundreds of pages.”

So there was the problem. The site had very few pages tagged, and when the visitor leaves a tagged page and goes to an untagged page, the GA only knows that the visitor has left the site altogether — because for GA, if your page isn’t tagged, it might as well not exist. And since a bounce is a page view of one page and immediate exit without looking at another page on the site, the broken page tags artificially created a bounce. (I won’t go into the intricacies of the visit length not expiring yet.)

Here’s the opposite problem, which I saw today (while I was actually looking at a computer, instead of Grey’s Anatomy.) I showed one of our customers how his site was doing with the new GA Site Search. Now, one of the things that you can do is measure visits with site search and visits without site search along many metrics. But most of the time, it doesn’t make sense to use “bounce” in the same sentence as “visits with site search,” because most site search requires the visitor to hit the enter button and see two (usually different) pages — a page with search and a page with results. Ergo, no bounce at all for most on site search (depending on their architecture. This is actually an interesting problem, worth looking into in depth…)On the same topic: pages that get redirected in the browser (and not by the server) will often see their GA load, and then the user automatically gets two page views and whoops! no bounce, even if it is a crummy page.

So before we fall in love with bounce rate, we have to understand it well.

*****

Of course, I lost the comments, too. I have most of them in email, so will try to reproduce them here. Jacques commented that he would love to see how GA computes bounce and site search (I can’t find that one in my email). Daniel Shields wrote, “Bounce rate is a funny thing. In some instances it is a very important means to uncovering behaviors which indicate propensities. In other instances, it creates almost no value when improved upon. Context is ultimately where the difference is. As a metric which receives so much attention from a broad, utilitarian perspective, I find it almost completely useless in itself.

“I attribute my insolence mainly to the fact that the bounce rate is dependent on important factors such as the linguistic relationship between where and what your audience searches for. Slight modifications to search algorithms in any direction can drive volatility in bounce rate. However, when bounce is analyzed with respect to keywords or referring domains, it becomes extremely useful in a marketing metrics toolbox. This, however, deals more with the idea of bounce rate as a technical performance indicator. I like that.

“It would be nice to have alerts built in for systems like this. Maybe someone close to Google should say something?:-)”

Finally, Alan weighed in from Paris, “Hi there Robbin, Bonsoir Jacques,

“You really got me thinking about this bounce rate issue and I think I came up with a legitimate scenario.

“It is quite common for certain types of sites to use result pages on their websites as landing pages for their PPC campaigns. It is even possible to automate this in AdWords by using the keyword insertion tag in the destination URL, e.g. www.mysite.com/search.php?kw={keyword} whereby the ‘bought’ keyword in AW will automatically be placed in the URL (I would advise against this however because of LPQ, but that’s a different matter).

“If site search is enabled on such a site with the ‘kw’ query specified, then GA will count this visitor as having used the search functionality from their very first page-view and all the visitors that bounce will contribute to the bounce rate in the Site Search reports.

“I have a couple of customers who had a site search bounce rate significant enough that it can’t just be explained away by what I call the “freak-occurrence factor” (i.e. 7-8% bounce rate and above). I cross-segmented their google(cpc) traffic by landing page and saw that most of them were indeed search result pages with the site’s search query variable in the URI.

“I suggest you check out the Landing Page report and filter on the search query variable to see if this makes sense for your customers too.

“Hope this explanation makes sense.”

And speaking of hoping, I hope that I got everyone’s comments correct, please complain loudly if I didn’t.

Yesterday, GA made one of their new features, Site Search analysis, available to everyone with a GA account. I started to set it up for my customers, and realized that I didn’t know what choices to make. (They give you choices, but don’t tell you the implications.)

So I did some testing, and here is what I found.

First, you’ll find the abilities to set up Search under the edit Profile settings:

Click the Edit and you’ll get this search setup:

Look to the bottom of the page to find it — most of the options will only appear after you click on the “Do Track Site Search” radio button.

Now, you have to find your query parameters. Go to your website and do a search. Look up into the URL address bar, find where your search term is, and what query parameter goes with it. For example, you might have typed in gifts — and your search term might look like this in the url: &word= gifts. Or maybe it looks like this, &search=gifts. In the first case, your query param is word, and in the second, it is search. No matter, just put that value into the Query Parameter (required) box.

But what if you have two on site searches? For example, our site has a regular search and a blog search. In that case, you can put your query parameters in with a comma, like this: word,search. However, the new search doesn’t seem to know how to separate them. You’ll get all the search terms from both, but they’ll be in one long list. You can disaggregate them yourself by working with the Start Pages Report (see it on the left, under the Site Search, which you can find in the Content Reports.) Or your can set up a new profile for the second search.

Now you have to decide, should you strip your query parameters out of GA?I did two profiles last night, one with and one without query params stripped out. I found that stripping out the query parameters here is like stripping them out in the Main Profile Settings (go look at that top screen shot in this post - see how you have the chance to Exclude Query Parameters?) This does a few things for you:

1. 1. It aggregates all your URIs (so that you don’t have to look at a million pageviews)
   2. It thereby reduces the number of unique pageviews (because www.mysite.com?search=Robbin is a different pageview from www.mysite.com?search=LunaMetrics). This makes it less likely that you will go over GA’s pageview limit and just get the dreaded (other) in your top content
   3. It enables you to take the query parameters out here without messing up your search. This is golden! One of the problems we always encounter is deleting query parameters and breaking our analytics. This is usually about breaking our goals, if, say, one goal is only distinguished from another with a query parameter. By taking them out here, you still achieve the first two points, above, without breaking your searchalytics.

Ok, now you are done with search terms, but not with all the other junk in your search uri. Maybe that’s all you have (for example, our wordpress search just has a search term in it), but you often will have lots of other stuff. The site I did the testing on had a little search box, and below it, allowed you to search by drop down topic, by country, and by kind of material (book, white paper, etc.) Each of those is a category. First, I did a few pretend searches to find out how those things show up in the URI. Then, I used the bottom half of the new search setup, where it asks, Do you use categories for site search? I changed the radio button to YES, and then entered each one, followed by a comma. Again, I stripped out my parameters. (I compared the two profiles that I set up, and noticed that, as would be expected, only the parameters I specified got stripped out.) Again, I noticed that GA doesn’t disaggregate the categories, so if they all come through as a number (the way mine did), you have to create a system (three digit number from one kind of category, two digit numbers from another), put them in different profiles, or perhaps the easiest, just use a filter to rewrite them. And then you’ll know what category they came from.

Before you are done, go on over to Justin’s blog, and read about Search Implementation. He talks about two interesting topics, how to do the search when you don’t have a query parameter, and what to do when you have multiple searches that are really the same thing, such as misspellings.