Cut the Crap – Check your Bounce Rate!

If you haven’t installed Google Analytics on your website yet, then I would recommend you to do so right away. Google Analytics will give you great insight to what type of traffic your getting, from where, the behaviour of your visitors and much more.

So what is bounce rate? I would say bounce rate is rather straight forward; think of it as how fast a visitors bounces off your website after their entry rather than continue exploring different sections of it. Some examples of a bounce can be when a visitor hits the “back”-button to leave your site, clicks on a link to a different website or close down the browser window. If you have a high bounce rate it could mean several things. For example, you might be ranking on the “wrong” keywords, meaning you are getting traffic from keywords that are not relevant to what your site is offering. It can also mean that – if you’re running active campaigns – you’re advertising on the wrong places and that you’re getting a lot of low quality traffic. Essentially, that is what bounce rate boils down to – the quality of your site and your visitors. If there is a good match between who is visiting you and what your site is about, you would most often find a rather low bounce rate that is around 25-40%. However, if you’re getting very poor quality traffic you could see bounce rates that are up to 70-80%.

Although low quality traffic can result in a high bounce rate, a high bounce rate does not necessarily indicate low quality traffic. It is important to understand that the bounce rate also depends on what type of website you have. For example it is normal to see high bounce rate levels on websites that focus much of the content and activity on their first page. This can be blogs, rss-feeds, livescore services etc. that do not require visitors to click around on the site. A high bounce rate is therefore not necessarily an indication that something is very wrong on your site.

Why is it then important to know your bounce rate? As you might have figured out, bounce rate helps you to ask the right questions about your website, and can give hints about improvements that can be made. If you have a low rate then you’re most likely doing a lot of things right such as advertising in the right places, matching your content with your target etc. If your bounce rate is rather high, then it will give you indications of what changes need to be made. For example, if your bounce rate increases during a campaign your running, then you might suspect that this campaign is sending you very low quality visitors (unless you’re sending them to a plain campaign section/site). This goes for online media campaigns such as banner adverts as well as SEM and SEO campaigns. If you’re engaging in some sort of activity, and see an increase in bounce rate, then you need to analyze and evaluate your campaign thoroughly.

Once you know where the crappy traffic is coming from, it might be a good idea to just cut it off. Why you might ask, isn’t all traffic good to some extent? Well, not really. First of all there have been some indications that bounce rate might affect your search engine rankings (although this is still being debated). However, search rankings aside, what is more important is that you will save money that you’re wasting on poor quality users. If your campaigns are generating high bounce rates, then you’re not optimizing your ROI. You’d most likely be much better off reallocating those marketing budgets to other sources.

So again, if you already haven’t done it, install Google Analytics and keep an eye on your bounce rate. It might save you a big chunk of your marketing budget.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency