Search Marketing Blog
Should I Care About My Bounce Rate?
Posted by Tyson Braun on 01.08.2009
As most online marketers are aware, many factors contribute to successfully acquiring new business through your Web site. One metric that is perceived to have a significant impact upon the number of site visitors who convert to customers is your Web site’s Bounce Rate. Your Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that arrive at a page on your site, and then immediately exit, or ‘bounce’, to another destination. Presumably, these visitors didn’t like what they saw, and left your site. It has been predicted that in the near future, a site’s overall Bounce Rate will be a weighted factor within search engine ranking algorithms that contributes to prominent positioning within Natural search listings. This is due to the assumption that, if people are staying on your site, then you must be providing useful and relevant content.
Often, a perceived goal is to have a low bounce rate, which correlates with on-page content related to the search query that delivered the visitor to the page. A few of our clients have inquired about their Bounce Rate percentage, and would like to see it lowered. Understanding what constitutes a ‘Bounce’ will help us understand how important this metric is, and the relevant importance for Web sites with diverse content and goals.
What if?
What if a visitor gets all the information they need (like a phone number) from a page in 15 seconds, and then closes the page? Is this considered a ‘bounce’ in Google Analytics? Yes. Is it bad? No, because the user found the information that they needed, and moved on. In my research on Bounce Rate information, I found Analytics drove many Web site owners to play the “What If?” game. For example: “What if a visitor opens an external window, is this a Bounce?” or “What if they only view one page, but that page contains relevant content and they left happy, is this a Bounce?”
The topic recently came up amongst the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team here at EngineWorks. We found too many scenarios where a visit session looks like a Bounce (i.e., a disappointed visitor), but could have easily not be the case. We came to the conclusion that the Bounce Rate score provides very little definitive measurement of a Web site’s success. This is due to the fact that Google Analytics does not take into account the amount of time that a site visitor spends on a landing page. For example, a visitor could enter on a well-optimized landing page, read all its content in five minutes, and then leave. Google would classify this scenario as a ‘bounce’. According to Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, time is not a factor in Bounce Rate measurement, so this satisfied visitor would leave a blemish on the site’s Bounce Rate.
“Remember, time has no bearing on bounce computations; just page views,” Mr. Kaushik recently wrote in an email. “The WAA standard definition of bounce rate, and that of Google Analytics, only considers the page view. Time has no bearing on the equation.”
What to do about Bounce Rates
Avinash Kaushik offers some great suggestions on how to use Bounce Rate data, and two of them stand out as my favorites: improving rankings for well-performing keywords, and improving the quality of top landing pages. When determining our Search Engine Optimization strategy, we seek to align search behavior with relevant content from our clients. If there is a referring keyword that drives a lot of traffic, and has a “high” Bounce Rate, we want to figure out what these searches wanted, but didn’t find on the site. Maybe the content needs to be improved, or there is some other issue, but now we know where we can increase conversions.
The same can be said for examining top landing pages that also have high Bounce Rates. As in the previous scenario, visitors want more from the page. But to bounce means they found it in the first place, which is the more challenging part. A little detective work can pay-off in discovering why a visitor bounces, and may even turn ‘bounced’ visitors into customers. Therefore, I recommend not obsessing over your arbitrary Bounce Rate score, and start catching those dissatisfied visitors on your internal pages by giving those bouncers what they are looking for!
Tags: Search Engine Optimization
