I played around with Instant Preview a little over the last couple of days, and while it looks nice on the page I haven’t found it particularly useful yet. I’ve a feeling it will work well for certain types of search, obviously anything specifically visual related, maybe shopping for product you know already. The level of detail offered in the Instant Preview certainly isn’t sufficent to decide whether or not the content of a given page is useful, so it seems to be trying to promote “good looking” web pages.

Time will tell I guess, but what effect is Instant Preview having on your website right now? For us, you can see from the Analytics screenshot below that over the last couple of days, as more and more people hear about the product, there has been a small spike in what I thought was “weird us traffic”.

The traffic can be identified as having a source of (direct) and a medium of (none) in your own Analytics. It’s normal to expect a certain amount of this traffic from all over the globe that Analytics essentially can’t identify, but only our US (direct) (none) traffic has experienced this particular spike.

Normally a little extra traffic would be more than welcome, but in this case I think Google is doing something wrong. It seems like every person who uses Instant Preview is being counted as a visitor to our site, whether they click through or not. Judging from the 91.92% bounce rate of the traffic in question yesterday, this is not a good thing!

The bounce rates above are only for this (direct) (none) traffic from the US, which wouldn’t be a problem if it were just the usual handful of visitors a day, not now that it’s heading towards several hundred with a bounce rate heading towards 100% it could start to have negative effect on the site overall. We work hard to keep our pages’ load times and bounce rates down, knowing that Google takes both into account when ranking pages.

Hopefully this is just an oversight on Google’s part which will be rectified soon, but in the meantime watch out for “weird us traffic” to your site with an abnormally high bounce rate. Let us know in the comments if you’ve experienced it too.

UPDATE 15 NOVEMBER

The UA we are seeing in our web server logs is 5.0+(en-us)+AppleWebKit/525.13+(KHTML,+like+Gecko;+Google+Web+Preview)+Version/3.1+Safari/525.13

UPDATE 23 NOVEMBER

It looks like Google have gotten around to fixing this problem now. We’ve seen the strange traffic fall off today on our Analytics, and Google have just posted this update to their Analytics blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/11/instant-preview-issue-resolved.html

Landing to Conversion Flow

But the best laid plans of mice of men and all that… Over time an increasing number of our visitors started landing not on our search results pages but directly on the profiles of individual clinics, arriving as a result of very long tail searches.

The problem we faced was that while our search results pages were designed specifically to be landing pages, our clinics’ profile pages were not. As a result of this our profile pages were suffering from a much higher bounce rate than our search results pages. For specific clinic types it was as much as 20% in the difference, and it averaged 10%.

Why Do Our Search Results Pages Work As Landing Pages?

If you search for ‘Dentists in Rathfarnahm’  in Google this is the result you will get:

Dentists in Rathfarnham

If you click on this search result you should have a clear expectation of the type of page it will bring you to. In most cases the user will be expecting a page from a 3^rd party site featuring several or all dentists in Rathfarnham, and this is the page we bring them to:

Rathfarnham Search Results

When the user lands on this page it is immediately clear that they have landed on a relevant page and therefore they don’t bounce.

Why Didn’t Our Clinic Profile Pages Work As Landing Pages?

If you search for the Rathfarnham Dental Practice in Google you get the following search result:

Rathfarnham Dental Practice

If you click on this link you are clearly expecting to find information about the Rathfarnham Dental Practice. Now look at the page we brought you to:

Rathfarnham Dental Practice Profile

The most prominent branding on the page is RevaHealth.com, not Rathfarnham Dental Practice, and the relevant information is a third of the way down the page. Many users were landing on the page and hitting the back button before they discovered that we had the information they wanted.

So What Did We Change?

We dynamically alerted the page that the user was landing on it directly from Google, Yahoo, etc, or alternatively that they were navigating to it internally from RevaHealth.com.

When users were landing on the page we moved the RevaHealth.com logo and search boxes into the right hand gutter.  We promoted the clinic name into the main place on the page so that it didn’t get lost in the content.  We also added a stock photograph.

Updated Rathfarnham Dental Practice Profile

We intended for these changes to have to two effects:

1. Move the relevant information further up the page
2. Better meet the visitors’ expectations that they were landing on a page specifically about the clinic

What Were The Results?

The results of the experiment were far better than any of us anticipated:

• The bounce rate on profile landing pages dropped by 6%
• The average number of pages viewed by visitors who entered the site through profile landing pages went up by 19%
• The average time spent on the site went up by just over 20%
• The conversion rate increased by 14%
• Advertising revenue decreased by 2%. We suspect this is because we were counting users who landed on the site and immediately clicked on advertising as having bounced. In addition, the advertising in the right hand gutter has been pushed below the fold.

Concerns

We do still have some concerns about this approach, mostly centring around the design of the site changing when a visitor navigates away from the clinic’s profile to the remainder of the site.

Let us know if you have any success or failure stories about increasing conversion and reducing bounce rates on your sites.

When looking at this it is easy to get caught up in looking at your main landing pages to the exclusion of the other pages. At RevaHealth.com we have historically focused on our search results pages to the exclusion of pages deeper in the site.

Old Page

However, times change and we have over 1.5 million pages indexed by Google. Every month Google sends traffic to a about 250,000 different pages including a large number of deep and seemingly unimportant pages.  The vast majority of landings are still on our main search results pages; however there are an increasing number of visitors landing on individual clinic’s profiles.

These profile pages all had a disproportionally large bounce rate when compare to the rest of the site and looking at the pages it should come as no surprise.  For an engaged audience they present the information in a reasonably structured fashion, however for a visitor who has just landed on the page it’s a bit difficult to see why they should stick around.

The most obvious way to reduce bounce on these pages would be to eliminate the advertising. However these pages rely on advertising for revenue generation, so we elected to see if we could reduce the bounce rate while attempting to keep advertising revenue static.

We introduced a navigation panel on the right hand side. The purpose of this panel is to inform the visitor about relevant content in the rest of the site.  The key points are:

New Page

1. The number of relevant clinics in the immediate area that they might be interested in.

2. Up to three sample clinics in the immediate area.

3. The number of relevant clinics in a broader geography with a means of navigating to them.

Other changes we made to the page were:

1. A new call to action within the address field – “Get Phone Number”. About 20% of the visitors to our site are actively looking for a clinic’s telephone number. We don’t want to immediately display this number because we want to track it, however we absolutely want visitors to know that it is available.

2. Introduction of default Description Text where we do not have a description of the clinic along with a call to action.

After making these changes, the bounce rate of the profile pages dropped by nearly 7%, causing an overall drop in the site’s bounce rate of just over 2%.

We’d love to hear your experiences with bounce reduction, especially any unexpected results you had.