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I can't code. Well, I know a little HTML, but I'm a salesperson/marketer. I'd take no offense to this statement. I also know very few good salespeople who ca

I can't code. Well, I know a little HTML, but I'm a salesperson/marketer. I'd take no offense to this statement. I also know very few good salespeople who can code. This post was written because I had clients who had built software, sold it off, and then were all big in their britches and thought they were marketing gods. The ads they wrote were totally awful and they blamed everyone but themselves for their high bounce rates. Maybe there are coders who are marketing gods. Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps. Jes' sayin'.

patio11 17y ago
Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true. There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers. Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around. P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing. And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Yes, but now you have to go re-learn radix tries. Stupid brain cache! You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth. Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.
- michellegreer1 17y ago
  37signals started as a design firm. Which meant they knew their audience because they WERE their audience. http://37signals.com/about http://37signals.com/about This is an exception, but rarely the case. In regards to bounce rates, yes, they are absolutely important and are one of the core metrics you want to reduce when you implement split A/B testing. Think of it this way: if you open a physical store and most of the people who walk in immediately walk out, is your marketing effective? How much did you spend to get that person to walk in the door? If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Curses to the "no immediate replying deep in a thread" filter. If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. If this were true, then you could use a low conversion rate as a proxy for making the decisions you are currently making based on bounce rate. If two metrics inenvitably say the same thing, ditch one of them. The interesting case would be when they differ. However, if your bounce rate and your conversion rates are telling you different things, then your conversion rate is right, because of the two metrics it is the one actually putting money in your pocket. If I were selling a product and the best thing I could say about it was "Either superflous, or wrong!", I would stop selling it. Everyone should stop selling bounce rate. However, it is not the case that if you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. Many pages on my site have a high bounce rate, which is almost entirely due to my traffic acquisition strategy, which is organic SEO. Because a) Google is not infallible with regards to relevance and b) organic SEO is greatly helped by providing linkable resources, some of which can be consumed without leaving the page, this tends to increase my bounce rate relative to relying on, e.g., paid CPC traffic responding to an ad telling them they need to sign up for my free trial. Since customers pre-select for willingness to sign up, bounce rates among that traffic are much, much lower. (In this case, as an artifact of an implementation detail, any interest in seeing the signup form will cause someone to be recorded as non-bounce. Of course, if I had implemented the form the other way and made that click do some JS wizardry to pop the form up in a lightbox, then the bounce rate would increase automatically. The fact that my bounce rate is very sensitive to my implementation details rather than any externally visible difference in user behavior should be a strong hint as to how useful it is(n't)!) Of course, I don't have the luxury of telling customers on organic searchers "This site offers a free trial! Don't click here unless you're ready to sign up for it, you'll hurt my metrics!" and even if I did, wow, that would be a catastrophically stupid thing to do now wouldn't it. I make thousands of dollars off the organic traffic even if 70%+ on some pages satisfy their immediate desires without generating a second page view. (And if they satisfy their immediate desire and then link to my page from their blog or class home page then I am so far ahead of the game it isn't even funny.) Bounce rates also reinforce a pageview-centric metrics model which was suboptimal but chosen for technical reasons years ago, and is now VERY suboptimal, given that we can have high engagement interactions these days without ever generating a second pageview, thanks to implementation details like Flash or AJAX. (For that matter, we can have high engagement intereactions without a FIRST pageview, because a good portion of the conversation occurs outside of our own websites. Given that I'm telling this to a social media consultant on a forum commenting about her blog I feel a heavy dose of Whoa This Is Meta at the moment.) Folks interested in more detail on bounce rates and their inherent, ineradicable suckiness can read my blog post on it later this week.

patio11 17y ago

Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true. There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers. Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around. P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing. And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.

tptacek 17y ago
Yes, but now you have to go re-learn radix tries. Stupid brain cache! You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth. Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.
michellegreer1 17y ago
37signals started as a design firm. Which meant they knew their audience because they WERE their audience. http://37signals.com/about http://37signals.com/about This is an exception, but rarely the case. In regards to bounce rates, yes, they are absolutely important and are one of the core metrics you want to reduce when you implement split A/B testing. Think of it this way: if you open a physical store and most of the people who walk in immediately walk out, is your marketing effective? How much did you spend to get that person to walk in the door? If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.
- patio11 17y ago
  Curses to the "no immediate replying deep in a thread" filter. If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. If this were true, then you could use a low conversion rate as a proxy for making the decisions you are currently making based on bounce rate. If two metrics inenvitably say the same thing, ditch one of them. The interesting case would be when they differ. However, if your bounce rate and your conversion rates are telling you different things, then your conversion rate is right, because of the two metrics it is the one actually putting money in your pocket. If I were selling a product and the best thing I could say about it was "Either superflous, or wrong!", I would stop selling it. Everyone should stop selling bounce rate. However, it is not the case that if you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. Many pages on my site have a high bounce rate, which is almost entirely due to my traffic acquisition strategy, which is organic SEO. Because a) Google is not infallible with regards to relevance and b) organic SEO is greatly helped by providing linkable resources, some of which can be consumed without leaving the page, this tends to increase my bounce rate relative to relying on, e.g., paid CPC traffic responding to an ad telling them they need to sign up for my free trial. Since customers pre-select for willingness to sign up, bounce rates among that traffic are much, much lower. (In this case, as an artifact of an implementation detail, any interest in seeing the signup form will cause someone to be recorded as non-bounce. Of course, if I had implemented the form the other way and made that click do some JS wizardry to pop the form up in a lightbox, then the bounce rate would increase automatically. The fact that my bounce rate is very sensitive to my implementation details rather than any externally visible difference in user behavior should be a strong hint as to how useful it is(n't)!) Of course, I don't have the luxury of telling customers on organic searchers "This site offers a free trial! Don't click here unless you're ready to sign up for it, you'll hurt my metrics!" and even if I did, wow, that would be a catastrophically stupid thing to do now wouldn't it. I make thousands of dollars off the organic traffic even if 70%+ on some pages satisfy their immediate desires without generating a second page view. (And if they satisfy their immediate desire and then link to my page from their blog or class home page then I am so far ahead of the game it isn't even funny.) Bounce rates also reinforce a pageview-centric metrics model which was suboptimal but chosen for technical reasons years ago, and is now VERY suboptimal, given that we can have high engagement interactions these days without ever generating a second pageview, thanks to implementation details like Flash or AJAX. (For that matter, we can have high engagement intereactions without a FIRST pageview, because a good portion of the conversation occurs outside of our own websites. Given that I'm telling this to a social media consultant on a forum commenting about her blog I feel a heavy dose of Whoa This Is Meta at the moment.) Folks interested in more detail on bounce rates and their inherent, ineradicable suckiness can read my blog post on it later this week.