Beyond the Bounce Rate – A Few Guidelines to Reduce Your Obsession
Most people have a metric that they obsess over. Supermodels watch their weight and baseball pros watch their batting average. Saudi Arabia obsesses over the price of crude. For online marketers, it looks like one particular metric has overtaken all others. That metric is the bounce rate.
I have been in countless meetings, and on numerous calls, where the bounce rate was positioned as the be all and end all of success, the metric that supersedes all others. In the religion of Web Analytics, everybody seems to worship at the altar of the Bounce Rate. Let’s play devil’s advocate, at least for the next five minutes.
Before diving in any deeper, let’s remind ourselves precisely how the bounce rate is calculated. I go on your site and arrive at a landing page, and instead of going to another page in your site, I leave. There you go; I have just contributed to the bounce rate. According to most web marketers, your site has failed me. In a tiny way, my interaction will have contributed to a poorer performance. But did I have a horrible time on your site?
Say you are a large detergent brand and you have a site. You conducted some research which showed that people go online to search for different tips on washing delicate clothes without ruining them. Like a good marketer, you create some precise content with step by step advice on how to clean that cashmere sweater. Your search agency buys keywords and writes ad copy around this theme, and directs ads to that page.
Now say I have this lovely cashmere sweater that I don’t want to ruin. I dutifully go to Google and type in my query. Your ad shows up, with compelling ad copy. I click.
I get to your page and it’s exactly what I am looking for with loads of tips and advice. I read carefully through the tips, and make a mental note to go back to your site for other washing advice. I close my browser and head over to the laundry room.
So, did you fail me as a website? Not at all. Did I contribute to your bounce rate? Yes I did.
One doesn’t need to look far to see examples of successful sites with high bounce rates. Did you ever stop and think about the bounce rate of a Google Search Engine Result Page? It’s nearly 100%. In Google’s early days, naysayers would often mention that Google was doomed to fail because it drove people off its site as fast as it could. What they didn’t think about was that these people were leaving because they were getting exactly what they were looking for (and that Google was often getting a few bucks in the process).
So if you are ready to unhook yourself from bounce rate obsession, here are a few reasonable guidelines.
1. Focus on conversions first and foremost. Sales and signups beat bounce rate any day. Who cares about the bounce rate if conversions are increasing?
2. If you are not tracking any hard metrics such as sales or signups, look at time on site before bounce rate. Remember the cashmere sweater guy? He spent a long time on your site, so consider the “time on site” metric. If the time on site is reasonable high (greater than a minute), the high bounce rate may be an indication that visitors are getting what they came for.
3. If you have a bounce rate below 30%, don’t jump for joy just yet. Your landing page might be automatically redirecting to another page, and so “officially” nobody is bouncing from your site.
Good luck and stay the course.
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