SEO Mire

Analytics and Bounce Rate

Sep 27

Javierseo analytics, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo No Comments

There are several ways to determine if a SEO professional actually knows what they are talking about or if they are an imposter. One of the methods to find out if a SEO is a poser is to ask them about “Bounce Rates.”

Google says this to the question, “What does Bounce Rate mean?”

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – 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. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Wikipedia lays it out like this:

Bounce Rate = Single Page Access / Entries

Bounce Rates may also be considered the percentage of visitors who are only on your site for a very little amount of time, as in a few seconds, before they exit.

There is not a set standard for determining Bounce Rate. However, most analytics tools will be close enough in their interpretation to provide meaningful information. Some basics of what adds to a higher Bounce Rate are:

• Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
• Closing an open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site
• Session timeout

A common misguided response to Bounce Rates is that there are set or standardized percentages which websites should aim for in regards to their Bounce Rate. This is simply not true. An acceptable or even desirable Bounce Rate for one website may not be the same for another site. There is no “average” bounce rate value which can be applied to all websites. There may be “averages,” which you may be able to see in Google Analytics’ Benchmarking page(s), but each website has it’s own requirements, traffic, and goals. In an ideal world, your website would have a Bounce Rate of 0% while attaining all other goals.

Bounce Rates are not a single indicator as to whether or not a site is successful or otherwise. Sometimes, a bounce rate along with other analytical data is required in order to be of any real use.

On the surface, most websites will probably want a lower bounce rate. However, there are plenty of reasons where a higher bounce rate would be either preferable or acceptable. The following is a list of some examples of where a higher Bounce Rate is not necessarily a bad thing:

• You are intentionally promoting a single page from which you want visitors to leave your site. This would include a page which has been monetized with advertisements. In this situation, a Bounce Rate alone is not a good indicator of success, but should be tied with specific exit point data, as well as visit times and so forth.
• An information page may have a high Bounce Rate if the information the user seeks is available on a specific page. This may also be the case with strategic landing pages. This example may go either way in regards to being acceptable or otherwise, depending on the goals of the site.
• Some strategic landing pages may have a high Bounce Rate if they are properly crafted to meet the users’ needs without having them move around on the site. This reason is on thin ice, but has validity still.
• A site which requires logging into an area which is not monitored by any type of analytics may appear to have a high Bounce Rate. Users are logging into your site and simply disappearing from the analytic tools’ radar.
• Similar to the previous example, sites which utilize technologies which baffle analytics tools, such as Flash, may create the impression of a higher Bounce Rate.
• Blogs may tend to have higher Bounce Rates due to the nature of the beasts, visitors jump in from someplace, be it an RSS Feed or other link, read an article, then bounce right on their merry way out of your site. This may be perfectly acceptable if your blog maintains a pleasantly steady following, however, it should give you some incentive to draw the attention of your visitors to related threads, comments, et cetera.

Bounce Rate is not an indicator of site or page quality. The misconception that Bounce Rate is directly tied to the site or page quality is that Bounce Rate does, to an extent, measure the visit quality. The easiest way to show this is if a site has a splash page from which visitors enter the site, that splash page may have a very low Bounce Rate, but the actual quality of that splash page may be lacking, if even present.

Bounce Rate does not account for bookmarked pages or pages added to Favorites. If a visitor enters a site or is on a particular page, which they then bookmark for later use, that page may receive a lower Bounce Rate due to this type of traffic. To compound this type of visitor, if they then click on their bookmark to this page, with only enough time to read or view what they could not or chose not to earlier, then they leave from that same page, the Bounce Rate is going to be lowered even further, by the same user! This particular case is where having a well crafted site may entice them to click further into or through your site, but some users try to maximize their time so much that once they find something, bookmark it, all they wish to do is go back and view what they bookmarked then move on to another bookmark of theirs or some other task. Either way, Bounce Rates do not properly represent all visits.

If your site or page is well ranked in a more generic keyword, your site or page may have a higher Bounce Rate because of it. In this particular scenario, it would be in your best interest to better craft your site to meet the needs of visitors for this more generic keyword by offering related information to that generic keyword. For example, if you rank well with the keyword “car,” sans the punctuation, there is no telling if your visitors want to buy a car, sell a car, research a car, find a movie about cars, find a book about cars, find a magazine about cars, build a car, et cetera. So, the landing page from this SERP (Search Engine Result Page) may have a high Bounce Rate. You would then want to determine other keywords your visitors and desired visitors are searching for, as well as entry and exit locations to then add appropriate content to your site. If “car dealer,” sans the punctuation, is a keyword by which your site is also found, or one by which you wish to be found, then add content to your site which would be of use for users searching for that keyword.

As Avinash Kaushik puts it, Bounce Rate “is awesome at identifying low hanging fruit,” if understood and used properly.

Another important factor involved with bounce rate is the amount of data being analyzed, or in this case, the amount of traffic the site and or page(s) is receiving. If two people visit the site and you have a 50% Bounce Rate, this may be good or bad information. If two-thousand people visit the site, or two-million people visit the site and you have a 50% Bounce Rate, as with statistical data, this is a more valuable piece of information. With this in mind, keeping track of the Bounce Rate also requires that you keep track of traffic volumes.

This article does not fully explain or clarify bounce rates, but hopefully it provides enough information where you better understand it.