Well, today I attended the virtual ClickTracks class where Avinash Kaushik was the speaker. As I read his blog every week I made sure to attend and listen to his presentation.

Even though the class was presented by ClickTracks, I appreciated the fact that they didn’t solely focus only on themselves. I was happy to see Avinash use a couple of screen shots from Indextools analytics (the one I have been using for the last 4 years)

I made sure to ask a few simple questions (the ones I knew would be answered in this kind of format). My first question was…

“What is the best way to track sales coming from repeat visitors when they just type the company name into the search. If there were 3 visits referred by 3 different keywords resulting in a sale, which keyword gets the credit?”

The ANSWER was that there is no standard way of doing this. Some companies apply credit to the first, initial keyword. His company actually gives credit to the last keyword used (the one that resulted in that sale).

I found my self doing the same thing. If people used a keyword (other than your company’s brand name) to find you and buy, then credit goes to that last visit as they were not particularly looking to buy from you if they had to search again using a search string that did not have your company’s name in it.

Bounce rate. Someone asked what the “average” bounce rate is and what is considered to be good or bad. In my opinion this is a very broad question and it depends on the industry, keywords, medium, etc. Yes … a 90% bounce rate is BAD and 5% bounce rate is great. But what’s the average standard…?

Avinash gave his opinion on it. … 20% to 25% bounce is considered to be very good.

His did mention that from his experience, pricing page usually has a very high bounce rate. I can easily concur with him on that one. It seems that way for many companies even if their pricing is competitive. People want to know the cost before they bounce.

Avinash did stress that ClickTracks has the BEST funnel report tool compared to other 8+ web analytics providers Avinash uses.

I couldn’t stop with only question so I dropped this into the Q&A;

“How do you use the funnel report if website visitors run like chickens to different pages of the website? Some want to see price right away, some are interested in company blog, etc…. how do you implement funnel report in this situation? thank you.”

His response was … Let them run around, then see if people are skipping through important stages. Also he stressed on the importance of structuring your website’s navigation to give some direction to your visitors.

That’s all folks.

Overall this was a pretty good class even though it didn’t go too deep into web analytics. Questions were answered and it’s appreciated.

ClickTracks promised to make the recording of this class available to all. Once they e-mail me the link I’ll post it here.

UPDATE:

Just received an e-mail with the link to the recording. Under the link I found the following text from ClickTracks

“This is for your own use and must not be posted anywhere else on the web.”

Enough said.

Sorry guys.