Bounce Rates [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In a recent post by Avinash Kaushik on his blog, some ques­tions arose about how to create/use Bounce Rates in Site­Cat­a­lyst, which are “out-of-the-box” metrics in some other tools.  I will use this post to answer these questions.

Ques­tion #1 - How Do I Cre­ate a Bounce Rate Met­ric in Site­Cat­a­lyst?
By great coin­ci­dence this ques­tion comes right as I was about to launch my post on Cal­cu­lated Met­rics so the tim­ing is great.  To Site­Cat­a­lyst, Bounce Rate is noth­ing more than a Cal­cu­lated Met­ric (Sin­gle Access/Entries).  You can cre­ate this met­ric as you would any other as explained in my pre­vi­ous Cal­cu­lated Met­rics post.  Once you have cre­ated the Bounce Rate met­ric, you can open the Pages report, add it as a met­ric and view the Bounce Rate for any page on your site.  If you are track­ing Site Sec­tions in the s.channel sProp vari­able and have pathing enabled for it, you can use the same Cal­cu­lated Met­ric in the Site Sec­tions report to see Site Sec­tion bounce rates.  This lat­ter exam­ple illus­trates the point that Site­Cat­a­lyst tries to pro­vide pow­er­ful tools that enable the end-user to uti­lize the same func­tion­al­ity for mul­ti­ple pur­poses.  The down­side of this is that some­times doing the easy, basic things are left to the end-user vs. being done “out-of-the-box” for you.  Bounce Rate is a good exam­ple of this and as a result, you may end up see­ing it as a default met­ric in a future release.

Since some­one will undoubt­edly ask, there is also a way to cre­ate a site wide Bounce Rate.  To do this, when you cre­ate the Cal­cu­lated Met­ric, make the for­mula “Total Sin­gle Access/Total Entry Pages” and save it as “Site Bounce Rate.”  Then you can add this met­ric to the pages report and switch to the trended view (you will see the same #‘s for each page in the ranked view so ignore that) to see a graph of the over­all site Bounce Rate.

Ques­tion #2 — How Can I See Vis­its and Bounce Rates for Top Land­ing Pages?
This next ques­tion is no dif­fer­ent from the first ques­tion above.  Site­Cat­a­lyst does not dis­tin­guish between Land­ing Pages and other pages so cre­at­ing the above men­tioned Bounce Rate Cal­cu­lated Met­ric would be suf­fi­cient.  Sim­ply add this met­ric to the report and look for your Land­ing Pages.  I would con­sider nam­ing your Land­ing Pages in a way that makes them easy to find using the search func­tion (i.e. Land­ing Page:December Sale, Land­ing Page:January E-mail, etc…) or you could add “Entries” as a met­ric to the report and sort by that to make your Land­ing Pages rise to the top.  With respect to Vis­its for Land­ing Pages (or any other page for that mat­ter), you sim­ply need to have Vis­its enabled (which is by default for Page­name).  Then you can add Vis­its to the report and view it for any page.

Ques­tion #3 — How Can I See Vis­its, Con­ver­sion & Bounce Rates for Paid/Organic Key­words?
I assume that the busi­ness need behind this ques­tion is to iden­tify which Paid and Organic Search Key­words (or Search Engines for that mat­ter) lead to visits/conversion and which of these lead to bounces (mean­ing that vis­i­tors from the key­word “boots” reach the first page of the site, but do not click on any­thing after that).  To begin with, see­ing Vis­its by Paid and Organic Search Key­words is out-of-the box func­tion­al­ity in Site­Cat­a­lyst, but the term used in the tool is “Searches” instead of Vis­its.  The Searches met­ric is a vari­a­tion of the “Instances” met­ric for the Search Engine/Keyword reports and can be added to reports as needed.  The only caveat that you need to be aware of is that in order to see Paid vs. Nat­ural Search Engines and Key­words, you must enable Paid Search Detec­tion in the Admin Con­sole.  This is very easy to do and sim­ply tells Site­Cat­a­lyst what query string para­me­ter rep­re­sents Paid Search activity.

Deter­min­ing which Search Engines and Key­words lead to con­ver­sion is out-of-the-box func­tion­al­ity as well.  Once Paid Search Detec­tion is enabled, Paid Search Engines and Key­words will be cap­tured in Con­ver­sion Vari­ables (eVars) so that you can see any suc­cess events that take place after vis­i­tors arrive to your site from a Search Engine.  To see this in Site­Cat­a­lyst, you sim­ply open the same Traf­fic Sources report men­tioned pre­vi­ously and add your con­ver­sion Suc­cess Events to the report (in place of, or in addi­tion to, Searches).  Note that these out-of-the-box Search Engine/Keyword eVars expire at the end of the Visit (or ear­lier if you spec­ify in the Admin Con­sole) by default.  If you would like to extend the expi­ra­tion beyond the Visit, you would need to use a VISTA rule to pass the val­ues to cus­tom eVars.

So far so good, but here is where things take a turn for the worse!  Under­stand­ing the Bounce Rate for spe­cific Paid/Organic Search Key­words is not some­thing that comes out-of-the-box in Site­Cat­a­lyst.  We have had many clients do this, but unfor­tu­nately, at this time it is a cus­tom solu­tion imple­mented by our Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices team.  If this is some­thing that is crit­i­cal to your business, I would sug­gest that you speak to your Account Man­ager who can put you in touch with Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices and if you are com­ing to Sum­mit, feel free to shout it out at Brett’s cus­tomer fea­ture request vot­ing session!

On a related note, another approach to this that I have seen clients take is to use a VISTA rule to pass the search type (paid or organic), key­word and page­name con­cate­nated to a cus­tom sProp (i.e. paid:boots:home page).  On sub­se­quent pages, you sim­ply pass the reg­u­lar page­name to the same cus­tom sProp.  Once you have done this and enabled pathing, you can find the com­bi­na­tion you care about, in this case, all peo­ple who came to the site using the paid search key­word “boots” and landed on the “home page,” and use pathing reports to see the paths they tra­versed after arriv­ing.  If you want to get a bit more fancy, you can add the Search Engine to the mix so you have the fol­low­ing: “google:paid:boots:home page” which will allow you to do the same thing, but sub­di­vided by search engine.  While these exam­ples are not as easy as see­ing a basic key­word bounce rate report, you can see the exit rates of each com­bi­na­tion and have the added insight of the exact paths vis­i­tors took after arriv­ing from a spe­cific Search Engine, Key­word and Land­ing Page.  This is some­thing that I do not believe other web ana­lytic ven­dors provide.

Hope­fully this helps, but feel free to con­tact me if you have addi­tional questions…Thanks!

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

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