Tip: Evaluate your sources and your site with Bounce Rate

Of all web analytics metrics, Bounce Rate is perhaps the most universally applicable. Why? Because, unlike the widely-quoted Conversion Rate metric, Bounce Rate doesn't require you to have defined conversion goals. This means you can use it to understand how well virtually any kind of site performs from a marketing standpoint.

If your site conversion rates are low, Bounce Rate can help you understand why. If your Bounce Rates are also low, your troubles are likely due to site design and usability issues. In this case, you might focus your efforts on streamlining your conversion funnel or making your site easier to navigate. But if your Bounce Rates are high, you can focus your efforts on redesigning entrance (landing pages), improving the quality of traffic to your site, and doing a better job of pairing landing pages with ads.

Our own Avinash Kaushik has just written an excellent article on Bounce Rates in MarketingProfs: Daily Fix. It's appropriately titled Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Limited Reporting Delays

A scheduled system maintenance this morning caused processing delays for a small percentage of our users. For several hours this morning, affected users were only able to see traffic data current to 3am PST. This was a temporary delay. No data was lost and all reports should now be fully updated.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Join us at Searchnomics Tomorrow

If you are anywhere near the San Francisco/San Jose bay area, please join our team at Searchnomics tomorrow, June 27th. The organizers have offered Google Analytics customers passes at a cost of only $100, but you must register with this double-secret password: "ga".

Our Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik will speak in the afternoon on Advanced Web Analytics Tips and Best Practices. He'll provide six specific recommendations that can help you create a strategic advantage from the use of web analytics data. Since I have a conflicting meeting on the east coast, my esteemed colleague Alex Ortiz is stepping in for me. He'll present on how to use the new Google Analytics interface to track both natural and paid search.

We look forward to seeing you there!


Posted by Brett Crosby, Sr. Manager, Google Analytics

Thanks for the Webware 100 Award

We'd like to thank Webware, the users who cast 489,467 votes in this year's Webware 100 Awards, and everyone who helped make Google Analytics a winner! Google was recognized as a winner in 10 categories. Other products in our family that received an award are Google Reader, Gmail, Google (search engine), Google Gmail Mobile, Google Maps Mobile, 1-800-GOOG-411, Google AdWords/AdSense, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Blogger, and Google Maps.

We're thrilled to have won and we extend our congratulations to all the winners!

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

The New Hispanic Family

Marketers are mystified by Hispanics in the United States. Many still use outdated segmentation approaches that depend exclusively on acculturation variables.

Why is acculturation segmentation becoming outdated? Because the largest wave of Hispanic immigration to the United States happened between 1980 and 2000, from 10 million to 40 million in twenty years. While growth has continued the portion due to immigration has slowed down and the portion due to births has surpassed immigration. That is why we are dealing now with a different Hispanic/Latino market.

While individuals still have different levels of language proficiency, the typical family has changed dramatically and with it the sources of information used by different family members. What does this family look like these days?

A typical Hispanic/Latino family these days has two to four children, depending on their family formation stage. The children are more likely than ever before to speak English at home, with friends, and at school, even if their parents prefer to speak Spanish. Depending on many factors the mother is more likely to prefer the Spanish language for communication, but is also likely to understand some English. The father, is likely to be proficient in English and can be also a Spanish speaker. A grandmother that lives with the family is most likely monolingual in Spanish. A cousin that recently arrived from Mexico or another country is also more likely to be dependent on the Spanish language.

Is this a complicated family? It is very complicated particularly for marketing purposes. Each of these family members will likely be exposed to commercial messages in different media and in different languages. They will have dinner together and talk about their experiences and the products they think are best. In some cases they will be confused because the messages some of them saw in English will be different from the messages some of them saw in Spanish. In other cases their decisions will be reinforced by the confluence of similar strategic messages coming from different sources.

Further, this family is more likely to be influenced by the children's opinions because they generally have a lot more access to messages from more diverse sources. The influence of kids can be fundamental in the adoption of a product or service particularly in this type of family. The credibility of children is augmented by their deeper knowledge of the consumer environment. It is as if children are subverting the traditional flow of influence in Hispanic families.

Should we start thinking about segmenting Hispanics/Latinos by type of family as opposed to by individual traits? Families with different lifestyles?

You Asked For it, You Got It. New Features Added to Google Analytics

Since releasing the new Google Analytics, we've received repeated requests for specific features. We felt strongly that these features deserved to be incorporated into the product immediately so, as of today, everyone has access to the most requested improvements. We are also removing the beta tag from the new interface and we'd like to remind everyone that the previous version of Google Analytics will be removed on July 18th.

What improvements can you expect to see? Here are the most prominent changes:

Hourly Reporting

Many of you listed hourly reporting as the most important feature missing in the new interface. We've put it back. Several of the reports now have a "View by: Daily/Hourly" switch that allows you to select whether you want to see your data by day or by hour. Andy Beal, our friends at Yelp, and thousands of others can rejoice in their hourly window to the world.

Clickable URLs

Danny Sullivan and a legion of others will be thrilled to see that we've added the ability to click straight through to external pages from links referenced in reports. Just click on the icon next to any link listed in the Referring Sites, Top Content, Top Landing Pages, and Top Exit Pages reports.

Cross Segmentation by Network Location

Many of you expressed disappointment that you couldn't cross segment reports by Network Location. Now you can.

Increased number of data rows per page

The interface now allows you to view up to 500 rows of data on a single report page, increased from a maximum of 100 rows.

Bounce Rate increase/decrease

Our always observant resident analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, pointed out that an increase in bounce rate (not desirable) was displayed in green and a decrease in bounce rate (a desirable result) was displayed in red. He was right, so we flipped the colors. Bounce rate increases are now displayed in red and bounce rate decreases are displayed in green. Ah, much better.

AdWords Integration

It's now much easier to link your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account, so if you haven't done it yet, now is the time.

If you look very carefully, you may also notice the following changes:

- Google Analytics now recognizes the following search engines: aol.fr, club-internet.fr, voila.fr and mama.com.

- Reports that are newly added to the dashboard now have their data linked to their more detailed versions.

- We've added Help resources to the Email Reports interface.

- Several countries have been added to the list menu in Step 2 of the Account Activation process. The list is now consistent with available country choices in AdWords.

Finally, our release notes are posted in our Help Center if you would like to keep up to date on future Google Analytics changes. We hope you enjoy the new features.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Events in June

The Google Analytics team is presenting at or attending three conferences this month, and we hope to meet you in person as we talk and answer questions about Google Analytics.

We're excited to attend for the first time Searchnomics on June 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. Searchnomics focuses on the importance of search to websites and online businesses, including site discovery, optimization, advertising, user experience, commerce and measurement. Attendees are about 50% Fortune 500 Internet marketing groups, and 50% online retailers. We're sending a lot of presenters there, including keynote speaker Marissa Mayer, our Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, as well as Google Analytics' Brett Crosby and Avinash Kaushik. It's a one-day conference with a packed agenda of seminars about SEO, SEM, design, branding, engagement, conversion, and tracking. Both Brett and Avinash will be presenting on action-oriented web analytics to improve your website and business.

We are also attending SES Toronto on June 12 and 13th. We will have a booth, but won't be presenting. Look for David Salinas from our Boston team and Paul Botto from Mountain View. Additionally, Alex Ortiz will be speaking on a panel called "Web Analytics & Measuring Success Overview" at SES Latino in Miami on June 18th and 19th.

We hope to see you this month!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Checkout E-commerce Success Story

We often mention Google Checkout and the integration with Google Analytics because Checkout is an excellent way for e-commerce merchants to optimize their conversion process for their customers and for their business. But how does having the Checkout button on your site and in your shopping cart checkout process actually help you? Why use Checkout?

Now there is an informative success story about using Google Checkout. Ritz Interactive is a successful e-commerce business that specializes in online camera sales. The checkout process is key to their business, and Google Checkout helps them in three ways: 1. by offering low processing fees which directly benefit Ritz Interactive's bottom line; 2. by offering incentives and money-saving promotions that directly benefit their customers, and 3. by offering a highly credible and secure e-commerce processing option from Google for buyers.

We hope you find Ritz Interactive's story informative, and click here to learn more Google Checkout.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team