Site Wide Bounce Rate

In the past, I have written about Bounce Rates, Traffic Source Bounce Rates and Segment Bounce Rates. Hopefully this will be my last post related to Bounce Rates, but I recently found a “hack” to calculate and trend a Site Wide Bounce Rate in SiteCatalyst so I thought I would share it. I define Site Wide Bounce Rate as the total number of Single Access Visits divided by the total number of website Visits. Unfortunately, for some reason, this metric is very difficult to wrestle down in Omniture SiteCatalyst because you cannot view Pathing metrics (i.e. Entries, Single Access) in Calculated Metrics unless you are within an Traffic (sProp) report that has Pathing enabled.

To date, the way I have reported on Site Wide Bounce Rate was by pulling Visits and Single Access data into Excel using the SiteCatalyst ExcelClient. Once there, I could divide the two and if I wanted to see it by day (or week or month), all I needed to do was to pull both metrics by day. It was straightforward, but I could not add this to my SiteCatalyst Dashboards.

The Hack
So let’s say that you want to report a daily/weekly/monthly trend of your Site Wide Bounce Rate and add it to one of your executive dashboards. Here are the steps:

• First you need to create the required calculated metric. In this case you want to divide Total Single Access by Total Visits (or Total Entries which is the same thing). I would recommend making this a Global Metric so all of your users have access to it going forward:

• Once this metric is created, open your Pages report, click the Add Metrics link and add the new Site Wide Bounce Rate metric to your list of metrics. It will be under the Calculated Metrics area. Place this new Site Wide Bounce Rate metric so it is the first metric and then add your regular Bounce Rate metric and finally add the Page Views metric and click the small triangle to sort by Page Views. When you are done, it should look like this:

• When you click OK, you will be able to see a report that shows your most popular pages, the Bounce Rate for each page and the overall Site Wide Bounce Rate. This report is handy for seeing how each page is doing in relation to the Site Wide Bounce Rate.

• However, our original objective was to see the trend of the Site Wide Bounce Rate and add it to a dashboard, so let;s get back on track. To do this, all you have to do is click the “Trended” link shown in the report above. As is always the case, trending will show you the left-most metric trended over your chosen date range (which is why it was important to put Site Wide Bounce Rate in the first metric slot!). After clicking it, you will see a report that looks like this:

So the resulting graph is your Site Wide Bounce Rate and you can now add this to any SiteCatalyst Dashboard. However, as you recall, I mentioned this is a “hack” so if you look closely you will see a bunch of pages in the data table for this report. What is strange is that the values for each row are the exact same. This is the place where you can see how much of a hack this is. This data is pretty much useless so I recommend just adding the graph to your dashboards and ignoring the data table. Perhaps in the future Omniture will let us add this type of Calculated Metric to the “My Calc Metrics” area so we don’t have to take such a convoluted path to add this trend graph to a dashboard!

Final Thoughts
So there you have it. A quick hack in case you ever need to calculate Site Wide Bounce Rate for your HIPPO’s! Enjoy!