What does “Bounce Rate” mean?

When a visitor land on a page on your website but doesn’t click on anything – this is called a “bounce”.

“Bounce rate” is the percentage of your web visitors that bounce off your website without clicking on anything.

What is an example of a high “bounce rate” and what does it mean?

As a general rule, a high bounce rate is 50% and above.  So that means 50% of the visitors to that webpage didn’t click to visit other pages of your website.

Every website will have a different average bounce rate. Some of my websites have a 25% bounce rate and some have a 75% bounce rate.

The website with a 75% bounce rate is very well optimised for several common terms such as “whiteware for sale”, “freezers for sale” and it attracts visitors from all over New Zealand.  But I have made it very obvious to visitors that the target market for this website is Hamilton only, so visitors not in Hamilton quickly leave and look elsewhere which counts as a “bounce”.  So in this example, a 75% bounce rate is not a concern.

Why do people “bounce” off a page?

1. They were looking for an answer to a question and your webpage gave them the answer so they left
2. Your webpage didn’t answer their question, and so they click “back” in their web browser to try somewhere else
3. The visitor was just browsing and nothing caught their eye so they left

2 Reasons To Care About Your Bounce Rate

1. You are wasting your money. If you are paying for visitors to your website (eg using Google Adwords), then you are wasting your money if your webpage is bouncing them.
2. You are wasting an opportunity. If these visitors are “organic/free” from Google, then you are wasting an opportunity at scoring a goal, so don’t waste this chance.  Review the content of your landing page.  What can you do to make your visitors take action?

How do you choose a webpage to improve?

You can choose problem pages that need attention by comparing the average bounce rate for your entire website to the bounce rate for individual pages.

Evaluate the pages with a higher bounce rate first.

You may find it interesting to use Google Analytics to determine the referring source of the visitors to each webpage and see if any particular source is generating a disproportionally large number of bounces.

5 Things You Can Do To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

1. If your are using Google Adwords, review the content of your Ad.  What promise are you making? What is the visitor expecting to see when they click on your ad and view your landing page? (I can help you to optimise your  Google Adwords advertising and stop you wasting your money)
2. Review the content of your landing page
3. Ask yourself: “What is the purpose of this webpage?”
4. Ask yourself: “What do I really want to say?”
5. Ask yourself: “What action do I want the audience to take?”

In Conclusion

It is not useful to compare bounce rates between websites. It is most useful to determine the high bounce rate pages on your website and work on improving them.

When clients first become aware of Search Engine Optimisation their first question is “how do I get on the first page of Google for [insert common keyword here]“.

Eg #1: A bed and breakfast wants page one on Google for “bed and breakfast”

Eg #2: A real estate agent wants page one on Google for “real estate”

This is the short tail.

A page one placement for a generic keyword is nice (here’s one of mine: hot pools), but it’s really really hard to get.

The real money is in the long tail

The long tail is about getting first page placements for hundreds of long search phrases. This is much easier to do. (And that’s where I can help.)

Imagine for a moment that you own a Bed and Breakfast in Papamoa, Tauranga. Which would you rather have:

1. 20 visits a day from searches for “bed and breakfast”
2. Or hundreds of visits a day from a diverse range of phrases such as “where can I find a bed and breakfast near papamoa?”, or “bnb in the bay of plenty with views of the beach”

My recommendation is to go with #2.

Mainly because you probably can’t have #1, and if a Search Engine Optimisation company promises it to you, they are lying.

The “Keyword” report in Google Analytics

One of my favourite reports in Google Analytics is “Keywords”, so you can see exactly what phrases people have used in Google to find you.

Keywords that you keep getting found for appear at the top, and they are great, but the real magic is lower on the list for very long phrases that only one person has used only once.

What we want to do is grow the length of this list from 500 (for example) to 1000 a month.  Because that represents 500 extra visitors to your website that your top performing keywords would never generate on their own.

Seems pretty easy to check doesn’t it? Just type in the keywords you rank well for, and there is your website near the top of the results…

Actually that’s not your true ranking at all!

Check again using a friends computer and you’ll get a very different result.

This can be embarrassing. I did this many times at a friends houses before I figured out what was going on: “Hey, John check this out, my website is #1 for ‘xyz widgets’… hey wait a second, where the heck is it??” Stink!

Why does this happen?

Because over time Google learns about you, your search behaviour, and what results you like (through software such as browser plugins, cookies, and being signed in to your Google account).

So every time you do a Google search on your computer you are training the Google search algorithm.

Every time you click on a search result Google ticks a box to say “Yes! We gave that searcher the link they wanted!”. But everytime you return to the results using the “Back” button, Google ticks a box to say “No! That link wasn’t what they wanted, let’s try harder next time team!”.

That is one of the ways that Google incrementally improves their search results over time.

But you are just one person, and your behaviour has only a tiny impact on the world. But it has a huge impact to the search results you get from your computer!

So, you are pushing the link to your website higher up the search results because you are clicking on the link all the time (but most of the impact is confined to searches done on your computer).

How can you find out what your rank in Google really is?

There is 1 way to get a true indication of your rank in Google (actually there are many, but this is the easiest, cheapest, most accurate, non-biased way I have found).

And that is: RankTracker software.

The paid version is pretty expensive and doesn’t really add a lot of functionality.

The free version is fine (but not being able to save the reports can get a little annoying).

Download the RankTracker software and give it a try.

(And no, I don’t get paid for linking to them (yet), I just think it’s great software)

First, the definitions:

• Unique Visitors – The number of individuals who have visited your website. But, if a person on a dial-up connection disconnects and reconnects, they will be assigned a different IP address and therefore be counted as another unique visitor if they return to your website.
• Visitor – The number of visitors who have visited your website. But, again, if that person has dial-up, everytime they disconnect and reconnect, they will be considered a new visitor.
• Page Views – The number of web pages your website serves. So a single visitor may go back to your home page several times, or refresh a page, each instance counts as another page view.
• Hits – The number of files your website serves. Every time your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) loads, every time each image on your website loads, each time your php or html files load, all these count as 1 hit. So if a website has a lot of these items on its home page, a single page view of that home page may generate 40 hits. And if a website has very few items, a single view may only generate 20 hits.

Why should you care?

You should care because the method that you choose to measure your websites success is important.

In my ebook I detail how you should create a benchmark before you make the changes suggested so you can measure the difference that those changes make.

Which statistic should you use?

Unique Visitors.

• Hits is no good because you could double it overnight just by adding a few images.
• Page Views is no good because you could have pages that need lots of refreshing (F5 on your keyboard).
• Visitors is ok, but if one particular person comes back several times in one day because they keep getting interrupted, you really only want to count them once.
• Unique Visitors is the best choice (and most webstats software reports that statistic accurately)

So the next time someone says to you “my website is so cool, I get 1000 hits a day”, you can say, “Whatever! I could put 100 tiny images on my pages and generate 1000 hits an hour! How many Unique Visitors do you get a day? That’s the only number that really matters!”.

And then they say “Wow, I’ve been such a dumb arse, how did you get so smart?”, and then you say “I learnt about it at SearchEngineGuide.co.nz, you should buy their ebook, it taught me how to improve my websites position in Google“.