AddThis also offers analytics to track the sharing / bookmarking activities of your site’s visitors.

Set Up AddThis Social Bookmarking / Sharing

AddThis bookmarking/sharing tool can be set up on:

• Blogs with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Tumblr platforms
• B2C websites with Joomla, Drupal content management systems (CMS)
• MySpace

To allow content bookmarking / sharing for your site’s visitors, set up and add the AddThis Button or AddThis Toolbox onto your website.

AddThis allows your site’s visitors to share your content through over 300 services in which most are social network sites, blogging platforms and social bookmarking sites, including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Delicious
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Google’s Blogger
• Google’s Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Bookmarks
• Google Buzz
• Tumblr
• TweetMeme
• Orkut
• Bebo
• Diigo
• WordPress
• Typepad
• Xing
• Friendster
• Faves
• Microsoft’s Live/MSN Messenger
• MSN’s Hotmail
• QuantCast
• Fark
• Kaboodle
• Netvibes
• Newsvine
• Plaxo
• Plurk
• Ping.fm
• Slashdot
• Reddit
• Squidoo
• Xanga
• Yahoo Buzz
• Bit.ly
• Mail.ru

Website’s content can also be shared to China’s SNS and bookmarking / sharing sites from AddThis:

• Sina Weibo
• Douban – China’s sharing sites on books, movies and music
• Tencent’s QZone
• Baidu Cang – Baidu’s bookmarking site

AddThis Analytics

AddThis Analytics offers 5 major reports for you to find out how your website visitors share content:

• Top Content report: Displays the web pages that have been shared/bookmarked by your site’s visitors.
• Top Services report: Shows the list of services (including Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg) that your site’s visitors used to share / bookmark your content (web pages).
• Audience Profile report: Shows counts of influencers and clickers.
• Top Countries report: Provides geographic trends on where your site’s visitors originated.
• Sharing Referrers report: Displays the top keywords from search engine traffic and top domains that sent traffic to your website.

To review more traffic details from search engines and/or referring sites, set up Google Analytics on your website.

URL Shortening

When visitors share your content to Twitter, AddThis will automatically by default shorten links that are longer than 40 characters through URL shortening tools/services bit.ly. For customized URL shortening, provide your Bit.ly and/or awe.sm account information to AddThis.

Google URL shortener explains how URL shortening tools work.

AddThis Toolbar

AddThis Toolbar allows your site’s visitors to easily bookmark or share your content and is available for browsers including:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Chrome

Wikipedia defines a heat map as:

A graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors

Heat Map on Baidu Analytics

The heatmap report:

• Shows graphical click patterns of your website’s visitors when they navigate your site’s individual web pages.
• Helps you determining how to optimize your landing pages and/or your B2C websites based on visitors’ click distribution.

Baidu Analytics

Baidu Analytics is a free analytics tool:

• That was initially available to advertisers on Baidu Phoenix Nest, Baidu’s PPC/SEM system.
• That is similar page-tagging web analytics tool to Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics.
• That tracks web traffic of your site based on page-tagging technology/method.

Baidu Analytics Setup

Use Baidu Analytics to track/monitor your site’s web traffic if you:

• Run PPC/SEM campaigns on Baidu Phoenix Nest
• Advertise on Baidu through several Baidu advertising products / channels / verticals

Baidu Analytics now allows free sign-ups. To track web traffic of your site through Baidu Analytics:

• Sign-up a Baidu Analytics account and add your website’s URL
• Generate and insert Baidu Analytics code snippets to the footer of all web pages on your site
• Validate the setup of the code snippets in your Baidu Analytics account

Traffic statistics of your website will start appearing on Baidu Analytics reports within 20-30 minutes, according to Baidu.

Enable Baidu Analytics Heatmap Report

To enable heat map report in Baidu Analytics, email: bang@baidu.com

If you have a Yahoo Search Marketing (PPC) account, then you are eligible to use Yahoo Web Analytics.

Set Up Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA)

Yahoo Web Analytics captures web traffic data through the Javascript/page tagging method, which is similar to Google Analytics and Baidu Analytics.

To set up Yahoo Web Analytics for your website, add a URL (project). Insert the YWA code snippet onto every web pages of your site.

Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) Basic Reports

Yahoo Web Analytics offers many basic web analytics reports including Traffic Summary Report:

And Pageview Distribution by Hour Report:

Under the Search Engines and Referrers Reports, Yahoo Web Analytics provides conventional traffic sources reports on search engines, search phrases (search engine keywords), organic search engines, organic search phrases, referring domains, and referring URLs (Google Analytics does not offer this last report).

Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) Demographics Reports

Yahoo Web Analytics uses data from Yahoo’s existing user base to generate/segment several visitor reports, such as Visitors by Interest Categories Report:

And Visitors by Yahoo Properties Report:

Demographics reports including Age Report, Gender Report, and Age and Gender Report of your site’s visitors are all available in Yahoo Web Analytics.

Other Yahoo Web Analytics Features

Through Settings Panels of Yahoo Web Analytics, you can:

• Manage user access rights
• Create segmentation
• Create custom reports
• Schedule reports
• Track PPC campaigns
• Customize merchandising categories
• Run scenario analysis
• Manage custom fields

Domain and URL Grouping

Your website may have different URLs that are hosting identical content (e.g. www.my-site.com/ and www.my-site.com/index.php), but the URLs are displayed as two different web pages (or line items) in all your web analytics reports.

To overcome this problem, use Yahoo Web Analytics’ domain and URL grouping feature to rewrite one domain or URL to another. In all the reports featuring the URL value, the data of the defined group will be added together to display aggregate data.

Definition of Bounce Rate

Wikipedia’s definition and formula of bounce rate:

Bounce Rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits

Google defines search engine traffic’s bounce rate as:

A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run.

Note that bounce rate is different to exit rate.

Analyze Bounce Rate, Reduce Bounce Rate

Avinash Kaushik and Jakob Nielson recommend measuring and analyzing your website’s bounce rate by segmentation.

Avinash Kaushik reckons you should:

• Measure bounce rate of your website
• Measure bounce rate of your different traffic sources
• Measure bounce rate of your search keywords
• Measure bounce rate of your PPC traffic (i.e. Google AdWords, Microsoft Bing AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns)
• Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages

Jakob Nielson believes you must analyze bounce rates separately for four sources of visitors:

• Low-value referrers
• Direct links from other websites
• Search engine traffic
• Loyal users

Dosh Dosh’s Maki believes you must measure bounce rate against your overall web site goals, improve your site’s bounce rate, and get more page views. To increase the ratio of page viewed per visit, include additional links:

• Links to feature articles with in-depth analysis
• Links to other news articles on the same topic
• Links to a dedicated reference page dealing with only the specific topic
• Links to a comment section/forum to invite participation by readers
• Links to a Back story or general background information
• Links to a multi-media presentation (audio/video)

Bounce Rate as a Search Engine Ranking Factor

If search engine traffic is important to your website, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge believes bounce rate is one of the factors in Google’s search algorithm. SEO Black Hat also has had this fact confirmed.

Bounce Rate Reports on Free Web Analytics

Measure and analyze bounce rate through one of the free web analytics:

• Google Analytics – Identify high bounce rates through Traffic Sources Report and Content Report
• Yahoo Web Analytics
• Baidu Web Analytics – Requires a Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest account

Baidu Web Analytics Reports

You can use Baidu Web Analytics to track all the web traffic visiting your web site and view reports.

• Visitors Reports by Countries, Regions and Cities
• Traffic Sources Reports by Search Engines and Referring Sites
• Content Reports by Your Web Pages

Baidu Web Analytics can show you reports that include the metrics below:

• Visitors
• New Visitors
• Page Views
• Visits (only header loaded)
• Vistis
• Average Time on Site
• Page Views / Visits
• Bounce Rate
• Multiple Pages Visit Rate

With an active Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest account, the metrics below will also show up in your Baidu Web Analytics account:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• CTR
• Cost
• CPC

Enable Web Analytics

Access Baidu Web Analytics through your Baidu PPC account’s Web Analytics tab.

Setup

To set up Baidu Web Analytics to track all the web traffic of your website, you are required to:

• Add your website’s URL
• Insert the code snippets
• Validate the insertion of the code snippets

Insert Code Snippets

Baidu Web Analytics offers you two sets of code snippets. The first set of code snippet is optional and should be inserted within the header of every page.

Only when this header code snippet is included, the metric “Visits (only header loaded)” will show values. The metrics “Visits (only header loaded)” and “Visits” together indicate how many visitors have not waited for your web pages to fully load before exiting your site.

The second set of code snippet is compulsory for tracking web traffic and must be inserted at the bottom of every page but immediately before the closing of the body tag.

Validate Code Snippets

Insertion of the code snippets on every page of your web site will be validated. You will be shown the page URLs that are missing the code snippets or have the code snippets incorrectly installed.

Baidu Web Analytics Intro Guide

Baidu offers an official introduction guide for Baidu Web Analytics:

Chinese Interface

Baidu Web Analytics can track web traffic for websites that are of any languages and are targeting any countries’ web users. However, the interface is in Chinese (simplified fonts) and does not yet have an English version.

Google Analytics, a free web analytics tool, offers multiple reports with many web metrics (Google Analytics metrics) for you to analyze the performance of your site.

Web metrics below were used to determine websites’ success in the old days.

Page Views

Page views can be defined as the total number of pages viewed during a single visitor session to your website. The metric is useful to indicate your site’s traffic load, but provides little value as a marketing measure.

The page views concept relies on the definition of a page. A unique page is defined by a unique URL or a URL plus appended parameters. Nowadays, websites are far more complicated with the use of rich media (e.g. flash, Ajax and YouTube videos), it has caused the measure of page views becoming obsolete.

Depth of Visit

Depth of Visit indicates your visitors’ page views per visit to your site. However, either a lower-than-average or a higher-than-average page views per visit will not tell you about how well or bad your visitors engage with your site.

Lower-than-average depth of visit means your site may have:

• Good site navigation
• Too few products or services to choose from
• Nothing that the visitors want

Higher-than-average depth of visit means your visitors have been:

• Browsing your site purposelessly
• Frustrated by the site search’s ability to find them what they were looking for
• Confused by your site’s poor site navigation

Top Exit Pages

An exit page is the last page that your visitor views your site during a visit and indicates the end of this visitor’s session. The web pages with the highest number of exits can mean:

• Your pages are poorly designed (e.g. Poor site layout, bad background colors)
• Your visitors find exactly what they want on those pages

The top exit pages or exit page rates does not tell whether you should improve your page.

Time on Site

Time on site is the length of visit on your website. A high time on site indicates your visitors may be interacting extensively with your site. However, high time on site can be misleading:

• Your visitors may have a hard time finding what they want
• Your visitors leave their browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your website

Occam’s Razor explains how time on page and time on site are calculated.

Conclusion

The importance of page views, depth of visit, top exit pages and time on site as web metrics have long gone. It is time to define and measure new and useful web metrics for your site.