WebProNews » Site Analytics

Ask scopes out Compete for Binoculars

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:59:42 +0000

Search engine Ask.com added data feeds from analytics vendor Compete to expand the view of a website via the Ask Binoculars feature.

In the search result pages at Ask, a binocular icon appears alongside many of the listings. A simple mouseover of the icon, representative of the Binoculars feature, brings up a preview of the destination site.

A new tab for Statistics accompanies the Preview now, itself moved to a tab in the preview window. The Ask.com blog explained about the update:

Knowing how popular a site is, for example, can give an idea of its influence and trustworthiness or it may be helpful in various types of research. Turns out Binoculars is the perfect tool for this kind of information. It keeps the result page uncluttered for the casual searcher, yet provides deeper insight for those who need it.

So we arranged a feed from Compete.com to enhance our Binoculars system.

Compete is doing a great job pulling together data from various sources to compile ongoing web statistics for a huge number of websites. For the inquiring minds among you, this data is now available directly on our search results.

Compete has gained popularity for its site analytics, offered freely to visitors to compare up to three websites. In some ways it has supplanted the venerable Alexa rankings, long considered to be weighted toward the opinions of webmasters and search industry pros.

It provides a nice add-on to Ask Binoculars, and falls within the company’s long-time goal of putting information at people’s fingertips.

The Bouncing Ball Of Site Analytics

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:12:50 +0000

Steady website traffic versus offer-driven spikes suggests loyal customers keep coming back, but the typical online entrepreneur might be more curious about those offers.

The Bouncing Ball Of Site Analytics

Ammo Marketing’s Gary Stein made it onto the Compete blog with a brief discussion of a client, a competitor, and site analytics. Gary compared his client’s traffic to a close competitor and noticed a trend:

Never mind the actual numbers: a clear trend emerged. While our client

Learn To Love The Bounce Rate

WebProNews Staff — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:28:06 +0000

When it comes to website analytics, bounce rate is as dead sexy as it gets when it comes to statistics.

Learn To Love The Bounce Rate

Site performance from a marketing standpoint can be understood better by webmasters who get the concept of the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits a site receives.

Google’s Alden DeSoto wrote on the Google Analytics blog how the bounce rate can help figure out troubles with a site’s conversion performance:

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.

Another Googler, Avinash Kaushik, suggested bounce rate could be the sexiest web metric ever. Some analytics tools may base bounce rate on single page visitors, while others deem a bounce occurs within a short, maybe five-second, time span.

With that in mind, one can judge the quality of traffic sent by referring sources. More importantly, one should look at the bounce rate for advertising campaigns:

In my humble experience this is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook. Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website!

Poor performing ads may indicate the site publisher should stop bidding on those keywords, and review the landing pages and other campaign attributes associated with them.

Kaushik said it is difficult to get a bounce rate under 20 percent. “Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying,” he wrote.

ComScore Bakes Cookie Deletion Study

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:43:53 +0000

A controversial white paper on the impact of cookie deletion and the effectiveness of the analytics that depend on them has been made public.

The comScore study contends that without appropriate adjustments, audience reports for websites could be inflated as much as two and a half times the actual number.

ComScore analyzed the first-party