Clicksharp Marketing

This is the first post of a series called “Metrics That Matter” in which we’ll delve into the many facets of your website analytics data, and answer the questions of what’s really going on under the hood of your marketing campaigns.

Today’s metric: Bounce Rate.

What does it mean? Google defines bounce rate as “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

What does it tell me about my site? In general, bounce rate gives you insight into the “stickyness” of your website content, and separates users into two distinct groups — those who arrive at your site and immediately leave, and those we decide to stay.

What kinds of questions does it answer?

• Is my home page scaring people away?
• Am I attracting qualified traffic to my site?
• Do any of my marketing campaigns have a poor ROI?

Two more points about why Bounce Rate is important.

One is that page load times are becoming a critical factor in search engine marketing, as algorithms are now smart enough to reward fast page loads with better quality scores (and thus better rankings relative to bid price). Your bounce rate is a leading indicator of this kind of problem — and could give you a valuable warning signal.

Two is that in this day and age, there’s more riding on your content than ever. Hence the mantra that “content is king”! If you’ve got a high bounce rate, someone else’s content is king, not yours. This will give you some indication that the copy writing and overall design of your site might need a once-over, particularly what resides “above the fold” i.e. what you see without scrolling down the page.

A parting shot — FYI, there is no obvious “sweet spot” for bounce rate. It varies across industries and budgets, though in general a decent digital marketing program will fall in the 35-50% range overall. If you’re above 50%, you might want to take a long, hard look at why so many people who come to your site and immediately run for the hills!

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 @ 2:50 pm on the category SEM, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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