In my past life at Advertising.com/Platform-A, I
worked with large retailers and big businesses that watched their web analytics
religiously. They looked at everything from conversions to keywords and in
particular, the bounce rate. My assumption was that most businesses were keeping
an eye on what is actually happening, if not daily, at least weekly on their
website. But, in speaking with many small to mid-size companies, I discovered
that really is not the case.
Your website, in its most basic format, is an intelligent interactive brochure
for your business ,no matter how a potential customer found you. A semi-social
networking conduit. As we all know, analytics is a key part to understanding
what is happening with your business and having analytics connected is simple
and easy. It astounds me that so many businesses are not looking at data that is
right at their fingertips.
Let’s start with the home page. If a customer finds your website with a search
engine query and they don’t stick around that’s an issue! This is called a
“bounce” – Someone who visited your website and left for an undefined reason.
You should try to determine WHY? Bounce Rate measurement determines the visit
quality. A high bounce rate generally indicates that an entrance page/home page
may be not relevant to the visitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate
Is your site content useful enough to capture that visitor and keep them? If not,
there could be multiple reasons why.
1.) Poor design - Your site may be poorly designed and not captivating or
compelling enough to make them want to stay. You have limited time to get a
visitor to take a walk through!
2.) Improper SEO – So a visitor got to your site by using a highly ranked
keyword/phrase in a search engine and when they arrive they feel your site was
not what they were looking for. Maybe your site messaging and content, title
tags, and meta information are optimized with the wrong goal in mind. You need
to eliminate the stranglers and focus the page content to hit those searchers
meant to make a conversion.
3.) Paid Search – Change your paid search campaign to eliminate those 100% bounce
rate terms. Obviously you don’t want to overspend and waste money in this
economy. Focus on exact match and limit broad terms to improve overall bounce
rate.
Bounce rates typically are not determined by length of time spent on the site
with Google Analytics. So, if a site visit occurs and that visitor stays on the
entry page for 10 minutes and does not go to any other part of the site; That
technically is a bounce. Someone that might have come in and stayed on that page
for 10 seconds and went to another page will not be categorized as a bounce.
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986
Your business needs to determine why a bounce occurs, and evaluate that rate on a
page by page basis and a keyword by keyword basis. You need to direct them from
start to finish and provide an easy to use solution for why they entered your
site in the first place.
You should also be mindful of the entry points that are driving traffic. If it is
a social networking site or link then don’t worry about the bounce rate and be
thankful that other sources are driving traffic. On the other hand, if you can
determine the bounce is coming from a paid search campaign, especially in the
content network, you should try to analyze whether that site should be part of
your paid strategy.
Last but not least, if you are a business owner, CEO or CMO and you have
marketing people on your staff be sure to set monthly site analytics review
meeting! You can learn a lot about your business based on what is driving people
to your website or in the case of the bounce rate scenario - what's driving them
away.
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