Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!
While we are on the subject, what calculated metric do you use for Bounce Rate? I have been using [Single Access] / [Visits], just as the Omniture Help suggests.
From the knowledge base:
... define Bounce Rate according to your business needs (typically [Single Access] / [Visits], viewed as a percentage) and save it ...
I have seen elsewhere, and it makes more sense, that I should be using [Single Access] / [Entries], so I am curious to know what other Omni customers are using.
The most common definition is [Single Access] / [Entries], and I have updated KB ID 2149 accordingly. The problem with [Single Access] / [Visits] is that, when viewing in the pages report, Visits will almost always be significantly higher than Entries due to paths where the given page exists, but is not first in the path. This will deflate your bounce rate for any pages where this occurs.
The problem with [Single Access] / [Entries] is that if nobody has entered on that page (often true for confirmation pages and the like) the result shows a "Division by 0" error - which is embarrassing to include in reports, and a hassle to remove. It would be really nice if there were some nicer way to show this.
On the other hand, bounce rate is such a standard metric that I feel that adding it as a standard metric would be the best solution.
[Single Access] / [Visits] is used for Site bounce rate, ie. how many one page Visits as a percentage of all Visits.
[Single Access] / [Entries] is used more for pages or sections where you need to specify entry Visits rather than all Visits
Bounce Rate would be very useful as a standard metric; especially as it could be applied to such items as marketing channel and marketing channel by entry page.
Completely hypothetical question, aimed at clarifying what's really important here:
Let's say you could only have one of the following two options:
A. Bounce Rate possible on your Campaigns reports, Traffic Sources reports, etc. but still as a calculated metric that you would need to set up.
B. Bounce Rate available by default, out of the box (i.e. not a calculated metric) but still only in reports with pathing enabled (Pages report and then a few Custom Traffic reports)?
Although it doesn't sound trivial. It's not Single Access (or Single Instance in this case) in my understanding. How would you define it? "Variable is set in the last ServerCall of the Visit AND wasn't set to the same value in that Visit before before"?
Or the easy way: "Variable was set in a single page visit"?
Before we provide a bounce rate (good discussions above about visits vs. entries, BTW), we need to agree on the definition of a bounce.
If someone lands on your site, does nothing, and leaves, that's clearly a bounce.
If someone lands on your site, then watches a video, or clicks an exit or download link, but does NOT view another page, is that a bounce?
I have a fairly strong opinion, but before I taint you with it, I want to hear whether video watching or link clicking disqualifies a visit from counting as a bounce.
