Archive for December 20th, 2007
Baselining - Bouce Rate
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
In a continuing series about base lining, I discuss Bounce Rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a metric which describes a users activity when they visit your site. If a person clicks though from an ad, or search engine result and immediately leaves your site, without looking at other pages, they have bounced. It is the aim of sites to have as low a bounce rate as possible. This means they are engaging with your content. A highly desirable thing for search engine marketers.
The Google Analytic Bounce Rate
As mentioned in Baselining to Protect Your Campaigns I suggested you should install and begin collecting data using Google analytics. This free tool collects and presents a large number of useful analytics.
The benefit of using Google Analytics is the fact that bounce rate is presented by default on the front page, and no complex analysis of time on site and depth of visit is required.
Why Baseline Bounce Rate
As mention bounce rate is an analysis of a users activity when you visit a site. The profile of a click fraudster is someone who will click through on your ad, and immediately leave.
This is especially true of bot activity and publisher click fraud where the main point is to click on as many ads as possible leave a site as soon as possible.
What to Baseline
You should be aware of your normal bounce rate. Mine is currently in the range of 43%. You should monitor and perhaps plot your bounce rate using analytics. If you see a sharp increase in bounce rate, this should make you ask questions. What have you done? Is there a change to your site? If not, and it is business as usual, you should start investigating your logs files in depth. I will discuss this in much more detail in another post in this series.
Caveat
Bounce rate should be used with other metrics to judge if your campaigns are at risk. The reason people are using click farms is to imitate a real user visiting your sites, clicking through to multiple pages, and perhaps adding a
Previous Posts In This Series
Tags: Click Fraud
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Click Fraud Network Recruit New Blogger
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
Oh yeah, that would be yours truly.
I have been asked by Tom Cuthbert CEO and President of Click Forensics, the company behind the excellent click fraud index and click fraud network to be their resident blogger.
I will be writing about click fraud in a vendor neutral fashion trying to build up the conversation on CFN’s blog.
I will of course still be writing here at Fraudulent Clicks on the wider click fraud scene including news and reviews of click fraud products and companies, something which does not fit into my remit at CFN.
Why not visit their site and consider joining the network. It is 100% free and provides a wealth of resources in the fight against click fraud.
Tags: click quality
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