Don't Drink and Drive!

Our public service announcement on WTEN for the holidays. I hope everyone follows this advice.

Adsense Ads and Bounce Rate

Do AdSense ads increase the bounce rate?

I've heard concerns about AdSense making a site look spammy in the past, and saw the idea mentioned in this discussion about link building and advertising.

The concern some in the SEO community have is that webmasters will not want to link to sites that have ads on them. There are varied reasons discussed in the above forum. One that stands out to me looks like a myth:

keep in mind ... bounce rate and ... the presence of adsense ads. ... some users ... hit the back button on some sites with adsense.

That's an interesting theory. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who leave a site right after landing on it, as opposed to those who visit other pages of the site. Some people think a high bounce rate is a bad thing.

Well, I checked this theory on my Traffic Court website. We have AdSense ads in most states but not all.

Let's start with New York - it's our original and biggest state, and we generally do not use Google ads on the NY pages of the site. I ran Analytics for a set period of time. See the image below - I use the Content by Title display and have my page titles set up so that this is a good (though not perfect) way of catching all pages from a particular state.

The bounce rate for NY for this period was about 67%.

Similarly we have little or no Google ads in New Jersey, and the bounce rate is about 69%:


Now let's look at two states that do have a lot of Google ads. First, Texas:

The bounce rate for Texas is actually lower - 65%. And let's check California also:

The bounce rate for California is lower still, at 64%.

Since the page title method is imperfect, I also looked at the Analytics Map Overlay to compare bounce rates for visitors from different states. This is another imperfect measure, but it may be helpful. Click on the image to enlarge if you can't read it.


Again, NY and NJ, which have almost no AdSense ads, have higher bounce rates than visitors coming from other states that do have AdSense ads - here California and Pennsylvania.

Based on these results, it would seem that the presence of AdSense ads has a minimal impact on bounce rate, and if anything it lowers it.

I'd love to read comments from others about this. What do you think about the impact of AdSense ads on bounce rate? Can you supply any numbers from your own web stats that would shed more light?

Follow up on unsolicited attorney mailings

In late July I did a post describing a letter that was mailed to a client of mine. This is known as an unsolicited attorney mailing. I think, but am not sure, that the powers that be in our profession decided there is nothing wrong with such a mailing. Nevertheless, I have no plans to mimic it.

A busy DWI lawyer

Got a call yesterday from someone with her third DWI case. The second was fairly recent, and third time is a charm so it's a felony.

Was talking about the second time to find out what had happened. She had hired a lawyer with a big web presence for DWI cases. She told me his name, and I started laughing. I'll call him Smelly to avoid making it too obvious who he is.

You see, this one DWI lawyer is becoming well known in the community of DWI lawyers, and not in a good way. He advertises heavily on the web and I've even heard ads for him on local radio stations here in Albany. I've never seen him in person, however. That's part of the joke. There is a community of DWI and traffic lawyers and we tend to see each other in court. Here's the guy with the heaviest advertising and yet we've never seen him.

From what I understand, Smelly's modus operandi is that he gets the cases in and then hires other lawyers to appear for him as of counsel. Maybe in his home area (a city west of Albany) he handles cases himself or has his associates do it - though I can't tell if he actually has any associates.

On his website he also claims to be a member of the National College of DWI Defense. This is interesting because I only know about the National College of DUI Defense. If there is one with DWI in the name, I haven't heard of it. He is listed as a member on the NCDD website, so I will give him credit for that. I should join and attend a workshop, but haven't done it yet.

Speaking with last night's prospective felony DWI client, she did not seem happy with the quality of the representation. I didn't get complete details, but it seemed like she had paid a lot of money for Smelly, someone else showed up, didn't do much for her and didn't explain anything to her (I spend a lot of time explaining things to our clients), and it also sounds like she didn't get much of a deal, pleading guilty to DWI on the first appearance.

Perhaps I'll learn more about Smelly as time goes on.

Even more on attorney advertising and traffic court

Going back to my recent post on an unethical "attorney" website, I decided to do some more investigation.

I faxed a note to the site's fax number saying that I had gotten a ticket in Westchester County for 96 in a 65, and that I would like a quote.

I got a fax reply from "Gailia Walters," from "New York Traffic Tickets." The fax further indicates their slogan as "The Traffic Ticket Specialists."

Ms. Walters said:
Thank you for selecting our legal services. Here is your quote for your 8 point traffic ticket case. After handling over 50,000 traffic ticket cases over the last 15 years we are confident to inform you that we should be able to eliminate or reduce your points to prevent your insurance from going up. Our fee for this case is $800.00.
To proceed with this case please fax a copy of your traffic ticket to 1 866 899 4713 with your contact info so we can send you the retainer agreeement, and the credit card form. (Please let us know if you would like us to email or fax these forms to you)
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to call.

Well, I did have a further question, so I called. Ms. Walters, if that is her real name, answered the phone. I asked her for their firm name and she did not give me a sensible answer. Then I asked which lawyer would be handling my case. She gave me a name.

Patrick McLoughlin. She gave me his phone number: 716-536-0589.

I looked him up. He has a website/page at www-dot-defendingwnydrivers -dot- com.

He seems like a decent fellow, but he does not look like Ed Meese, James Baker, or Michael Deaver (see my previous post).

I also like how he's based in Rochester, and he handles "Criminal Defense Starting at $185"). Most likely Ms. Walters misunderstood when I said Westchester and thought I meant Rochester.

Traffic Court Idiots

I hope readers will forgive my anger about this, but I'm just getting annoyed by something with our traffic court website.

If you want to review a page of our site while reading this, it may be helpful. Consider Hudson City Court.

Some time ago, we were getting a number of calls from people who thought we were the court. I didn't think what we were doing then was really confusing, but we still made an effort to make it less confusing.

We used to have the attorney advertisement at the top of the page, on the right side. It was clearly written to look like an advertisement, and it had our toll-free number on it.

Next we redesigned the page so it looks mostly like it looks now. We moved the court phone number to the top of the content, and put it in bold so it would be all that much harder to miss. We moved the attorney advertisement to the third line (after the Google Maps link), and had that ad designated: Defense Lawyer.

That still didn't work completely, as people called thinking we were the public defender, or in some cases they still thought we were the court.

So we revised it again slightly. We changed the "Defense Lawyer" phrase to what we thought was a more obvious "Attorney Advertisement."

And yet I still get calls. Let me be just be clear about why I think these people are idiots, even more so than all I've said.

I get calls from people on Sunday night. It's a toll-free number. What kind of idiot thinks that the courts have toll-free numbers and answer their phones on weekends? Well, apparently, a lot of idiots.

I'm open to any other suggestions on how we can make this clearer on our website. Should we put the words "Attorney Advertisement" in red? Make the real phone number bigger?

There's the numbers side of things. We get 20,000 visitors a month, and growing so we're approaching about 1000 a day on average. If only 1% of these visitors are idiots, that means 10 idiot calls a day.

Comments on this post with suggestions for how to improve the town-court.com site are welcome (as comments always are on this blog).