ia play

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes what people are searching for, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

As well as popular queries, I’ve been examining the bounce rates in our search logs. Often interpreted as a bad thing (after all, you don’t want people to leave your site) bounce rates can mean all sorts of things. The searcher could have rapidly realised they are in completely the wrong place for their query, they could have been dissatified with the content, or they might have only been looking for a quick answer which the site actually satisfied.

You need more evidence before you can unravel which of these reasons is causing a high bounce rate. If I see the query has a high bounce rate,  and a high number of new visitors and the query is non-RNIB specific  then this tends to suggest the searchers ended up on the site “by mistake”. I see this alot where the query is quite general e.g. “curriculum” or “flash” and then content on the RNIB is specifically about accessible curriculums or accessible Flash.

Some seemingly similar searches have very different bounce rates.  Searches for ‘Helen Keller’ average a much higher bounce rate than searches for ‘Louis Braille’. This doesn’t necessarily reflect lower satisifaction with the Helen Keller content. ‘Helen Keller’  goes to a simple lengthy page with limited onward links. Louis Braille, on the other hand, leads users to a mini-site about Louis Braille and Braille more generally.  Whilst ‘Helen Keller’ has a high bounce rate the term also has a reasonably high “time spent”, so you could interpret this as the searcher got the information they were looking for and didn’t feel the need to explore further.

The logs might provide evidence for areas where we should try and lower the bounce rates. Should we be trying to keep the attention of the web designers and developers who stumbled onto the site looking for general web design ideas? Or the schoolchildren looking for a Helen Keller biography to complete their homework? Or fundraisers looking for ideas for raising money? Which group represents a better opportunity for the RNIB? This needs more thought.

Intriguingly, the bounce rate for ‘RNIB judd st’ is twice that for ‘RNIB Judd street’ but the results are the same. Does that reflect the impatience of a searcher who won’t spell out ‘street’ in full?

Next:  spotting real opportunities

I mentioned in my mum couldn’t use that that my mother is a computer programmer, so given the close proximity of Mothers’ Day (in the UK at least) and Ada Lovelace day (in the blogging world) it seemed appropriate to blog about Mum.

Mum studied physics at Kings College in the late 1960s. She doesn’t remember that choice being particularly controversial at her all-girls convent school. Nor was Grandad fussed by it. My aunt was already at Kings, also studying physics so Mum’s choices were rather ordinary for the family. Both sisters were very much in the female minority but they seemed to enjoy their status (they also met their future husbands on their courses).

My aunt left Kings and went to work at Jodrell Bank,  a job I am still insanely jealous of. Mum became a physics teacher and later a computer programmer.

Mum has been a huge influence on me. She made a technical career seem perfectly normal,  and left me rather oblivious to any prejudice. As a result I am a rather poor feminist. I feel rather more constrained by looking much younger than I am, and by being an introvert. I struggle to think of any situations where I have experienced sexism. At least from the men…

I was surprised by my female colleagues reaction when I not only married but became Mrs Loasby. They were horrifed that I would “take the man’s name”. As my other surname came from my dad the objection seemed ill-thought through.

At least I’d chosen my husband and chosen to take his name. I never had any say in Harvey. Even more bizarrely they seemed to accept my decision when I mentioned that I would be the only ‘Karen Loasby’ in Google. Patriachy,  it seems, is ok if it enhances your brand!

Recent news also attacked  the Mrs title. Only very close friends and utility companies address me as Mrs Loasby. I don’t actively use Mrs and I’m baffled by a colleague who puts (Mrs) after her name in her email signature but I’m not concerned by the (empty) symbolism.

This doesn’t mean I’m in favour of sexism. I’m outraged that my grandmothers were held back by society. One was a civil servant and one a matron. Both were more educated and could earn more than their husbands but their careers were constrained by the attitudes of my great-grandparents,  one of my grandfathers and by the civil service. But their world seems utterly alien to me.

I never experienced any prejudice at school. The teachers were outraged when I didn’t study Physics at university. It was a similar non-issue at university.

At work my best  bosses have been women but I’ve had two awful female bosses too. Jen Rigby, Margaret Hanley, Julia Whitney and Helen Davies have all helped me greatly. This might just be a sympton that the BBC and RNIB don’t  discrimate against women.At the moment my boss is female, the head of IT is female and the CEO is female. This is my normality.

I suspect this is my mum’s fault. She was both inspiration and insulation and deserves a post of her own.

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes bounce rates, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

As I explained on Friday I’ve been categorising the top 500 referring keywords for RNIB.org.uk.

Before I did the categorisation, Helen Keller and RNIB were far and away the biggest referrers. Both are a magnitude of 10 larger than any other individual query. But the third largest query is for Glaucoma and other specific eye conditions appeared frequently throughout the logs (as do a multitude of Helen Keller related queries) so I was interested in other significant types of query.

So after my arbitrary categorising I ended up with these types (these are not actual keywords):

1. Helen Keller
2. Specific eye conditions
3. RNIB
4. Welfare support and benefits
5. Keyboard shortcuts
6. Eye tests
7. Equality and disability rights
8. Fundraising ideas
9. Louis Braille
10. Talking Books

(these ten cover about 50% of all the keywords)

As I said earlier the categories are a bit arbitrary. I could easily have grouped eye conditions and eye tests into ‘eye health’ and Helen Keller and Louis Braille could be “historical figures”. The categorising helps more as a activity for immersing myself in the full 500 list and getting a feel for what is significant in the logs.  The actual rankings are a bit of a red herring.

Next: bounce rates

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes what people are searching for, bounce rates, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

I’ve been rooting around in the search logs for RNIB.org.uk. We use Google Analytics which isn’t accessible so most data has to be exported and shared in Excel.

So far I’ve  got my hands on:

• the top 500 keyword referrers from external search engines (2008)
• top 500 keywords used on site search (last  six months of 2008)
• top referring search engines

But that’s plenty to be getting on with.

I have to remind myself I’m only looking at the most popular terms and there’s a whole long tail I have no visibility of.  There’s also some clearly dubious queries in the logs.

So far I’ve gone through the top 500 from external search engines and loosely categorised them. The categories aren’t particularly scientific;  I’ve grouped all eye conditions into one category and grouped all queries about Helen Keller into another. Those don’t seem particularly equivalent categories but there are similar in size of queries. I’m following my instincts a bit at this stage.

For each category I’ve added up the total visits, and then worked up the average bounce, time on site and new visits per query type. I’ve also started adding information about whether the query is likely to be answered with a quick fact or should generate a longer journey.

Some of the questions I am trying to answer:

• Which queries should influence  navigation design?
• Where should we be encouraging further/longer journeys?
• What content isn’t represented in the logs? We might need to work on optimising those.
• Which queries are a poor opportunity since the referral was accidental or mis-directed

As a side benefit I’ve already learnt what Bump-ons are.

Next: what people are searching for

My first six months at the RNIB are up. I’ve spent them mostly playing catch-up and firefighting on the intranet project. Now it is time to actually do some planning.

My department’s focus is mostly internal, I’m a bit of anomaly with my work on the website.

Some constraints to bear in mind:

• I’m the only IA
• Must be extremely responsible with the charity’s money
• Small organisation, doing many things, so staff are time-poor
• Software development is not what the organisation specialises in

At the moment I’m thinking we could get alot of value of focusing quite heavily on search. I’ll have to do that anyway for the website relaunch but there are big gains to be had from getting the intranet search working well and then exploring enterprise search.

I’m also interested in what we could do with automating related links. Never quite got there at the BBC but there’s an even stronger case here. Authors have very little time to create rich related links and the tendancy is to only promote content produced by their own teams, as ever.

Some simple reference data management might also be needed, possibly to support the enterprise search and automated links plan but also to improve interoperability of all sorts of systems.

Just first thoughts…