During the time that I have been working with analytics, I have noticed a repetitive issue with forms and high bounce rates. The majority of my clients are service oriented and those who have analytics in place allow for a good evaluation of site exit points and pages with high bounce rates. Usually it is the form page that causes visitors to leave.

Frustration is the #1 cause for a user leaving a site -if the form is too long and/or asks for too much personal information. Also, irritating questions that require heavy typing can certainly lead to visitor frustrations that may result in abandonment. Clients who have made it all the way to your form page are definitely interested in your service/s and/or products. Don’t allow a bad form page to scare them away.

Let’s see what we can do in order to keep our visitors happy and wanting to fill out forms for us:

1) Align the fields in an organized way so everything is clean looking and easy to understand.
2) Keep it short-ask only for information that is necessary for a completion of the request.
3) Eliminate heavy typing- a drop down menu is a great solution.
4) Try to eliminate login and password creation to save time.

With these simple steps, you will be able to hold on to your prospects and reduce your bounce rates dramatically!

With the 2007 NFL Draft now less than 1 month away, fantasy football geeks such as me are already in mid-season football form. To us, NFL Football is a year-round sport that does not stop for other sports, such as the Daytona 500, the “Final Four”, or even the NBA Finals. Thank the Lord for the NFL Network!

So the other day, a few of my fantasy football league members and I were reciting (and arguing) to each other what the top 10 picks in our draft would be, which is rapidly approaching in less than 5 months. Some of the reasoning behind our banter is based upon factors such as weather, coaching staff, offensive playbook, other teammates, and even plain old gut feelings.

However, our discussions and subsequent evaluations mainly centered on some Key Performance Indicators, such as:

-Yards (Passing, Rushing, and Receiving)
-Touchdowns (Passing, Rushing, and Receiving)
-Turnovers (Interceptions and Fumbles)

It was during this meeting of the minds that I realized how close Fantasy Football Analysis and Web Analytics are, as we also use Key Performance Indicators in Web Analytics. While these are usually different from campaign to campaign, or even Ad Group to Ad Group, there are usually a couple of very important metrics that you look at.

Example: I am running Campaign XYZ. My KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) just happen to be:

-Click-through Rate
-Conversions
-Conversion Rate
-Cost / Conversion

Now, we all know that looking at one of these metrics on its own can be extremely misleading. For example, last season, Tiki Barber gained 2,127 all-purpose yards, which is fantastic. However, upon further review, he only scored 5 Touchdowns, which is extremely pedestrian. Also, 258 of those 2,127 yards, and 3 of those 5 Touchdowns came in the very last game of the NFL season, which for most fantasy-footballers is completely useless, as our seasons generally end on week 16, and sometimes on week 15. Tiki Barber has retired from football, but if he were playing next season, he would no doubt have a tough time cracking anyone’s “Top 5” list, despite that massive yardage total.

If I’m looking at the performance of one of my Google CPC Campaigns in Google Analytics, via the All CPC Analysis report, I can see that I got 3,554 Clicks last month (Good!). I can also see that my Click-Through Rate is a very solid 7.74% (Awesome!). But then, as I use the bottom horizontal scroll-bar on my browser and slide it to the right, I can see that this cost me a whopping $1,844.93. My Cost per Conversion is a rather un-mentionable - $614.98. A quick math calculation will show me that I only collected 3 Conversions all of last month, costing me almost $2,000! Clearly, we would need to do some work on this Campaign, despite all that traffic and that good Click-through Rate.

“Player vs. Defense Match-ups” is one of the most under-rated concepts / strategies in Fantasy Football, but also one of the most over-analyzed as well. Every fantasy football team owner knows what’s coming when you “Over-Coach”, and possibly bench a great player for one week, only to see that player have the game of his life while scoring exactly zero points for your team. This happens quite frequently with superstar players. Last season, I was fortunate enough to play a team that benched Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver Chad Johnson (an elite player), only to see him explode for 260 Yards and 2 Touchdowns, against, at the time, a very potent San Diego Chargers defense. The moral here is to always play your superstar players.

Your homepage on your website is YOUR superstar player. It’s going to get the most visits, the most Pageviews, and chances are very good that a lot of your conversions and sales are going to come right off of that homepage. So when you see that 3% of your visitors spent less than 8 seconds viewing your homepage before they left your site entirely, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should rush to change the font-size of all the text, the location of all the graphics, and add a giant Flash presentation right in the middle of the page. Know that your homepage gets the most traffic, and with more traffic, the more chances of some of it being of no use to you.

I could go on and on, but I’m pretty sure that by now you can see the correlation between two completely opposite worlds. Or, are they opposite worlds?

MoreVisibility Analytics Blog

I would like to talk abut something called an Assist. When I think of the word “assist”, I think of one man: John Stockton. For those of you that don’t know, Stockton is the NBA’s all-time leader in assists, with 15,806 of ‘em over his 19-year career.*

In basketball, an assist is when a player’s pass helps set-up a made shot.

Just the other day, one of my co-workers came up to me and asked me something like: “Hey Joe, I was in the YSM interface, and I saw the column “assists” in one of the reports. What the heck is an assist?”

Well, similar to basketball, an assist in Yahoo! is when a keyword or ad helps set-up a conversion from another keyword or ad.

Would you like a more technically-oriented definition of it? Here it is, from Yahoo! themselves:

“The number of times a keyword or ad contributed to a conversion that was credited to another keyword or marketing activity. Assists must occur within 45 days of the conversion event to be recorded. Within any 45 day period, a conversion event can have a maximum of 30 assists recorded.”

Here’s an example. Let’s say someone types in “brown shoes”, and then clicks on your Ad. The person even goes as far as adding a pair of Brown Shoes to their shopping cart. But then, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that they accidentally close their browser! So, they open it back up, but they forget what search term they used, and possibly what website they were just shopping at. They now type in “men’s dress shoes”, find the Ad for your website, pick up where they left off, and then purchase that same pair of Brown Shoes (that was most likely still in their shopping basket).

While the keyword “men’s dress shoes” will get credited with the conversion, “brown shoes” will get the credit for the assist.

I understand that this is an unlikely example, but it’s merely that, an example. Another possibility for an assist is when someone clicks on your ad, and then comes back later to buy / convert / fill out your form, without clicking on your ad again (I know, I know…I’m basically saying the same thing again). This happens quite frequently with websites that sell tickets, or have special sales on certain days or weeks.

Yes, the NBA Playoffs are fast approaching, but they are not the only ones dishing out assists

*Source – NBA.com.