Bounce Rate: Is Your Internet Campaign Succeeding?
Written by admin on November 5th, 2009 in SEO.
The majority of people believe that a bounce rate is an important measure of how a site’s marketing campaign is performing; but can the bounce rate be a measure of a failing website or adverting campaign? Also, will having a small bounce rate allow you to succeed?
To better answer these questions, you need to know what a bounce rate is. A bounce rate is the percentage of people who get off your website as soon as they get on. The amount of time they stay is less than 30 seconds to a minute, or they only visit one page. Google has their own definition: “the percentage of one page visits or when a viewer leaves a site after only seeing the landing, or entrance, page.”
So, what does this mean for online marketing campaigns? Marketers use bounce rates to measure performance of a campaign. For instance, if you are running a Pay Per Click, or PPC, campaign using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search, or Bing Adcenter, making a report on the percentage of people who exit your site immediately is simple, especially using Google Analytics. This goes for marketers who use banner, images, or content based advertisements to drum up traffic flowing to their site. But, are people actually staying on the website, and is it even important that they do?
It is a common assumption that if too many people are leaving your site too quickly, or a large bounce rate, there must be something wrong with your site. This could be happening for several reasons: your entrance page is not performing as it needs to be, or perhaps your marketing campaigns are not targeting the right group of people. However, think about this. What if your problems are hidden by having a small bounce rate? And, what if a large bounce rate is not necessarily a terrible problem?
You are probably thinking this is great news. Now, you want to know when having a large bounce rate is acceptable. Ponder the following points.
* Your entrance page has visitors filling out a form to place a telephone call or send out an email. According to the amount of fields in the form, emails can be a lot faster.
* Your entrance page might purposely post a link that sends visitors to another website. So, you must track this, or your website will be thought to have poor performance.
* Your call to action could require a reader to download PDF files, listen to MP3 files, or do something else that cannot be tracked.
* Your visitor might have his or her java script or cookies turned off, which will stop tracking programs from being able to do their job.
You can see how the situations listed above can reflect inaccurately high bounce rates because there are times when bounce rates cannot be measured. Also, keeping track of phone calls is not easy even for the largest of companies that have healthy budgets. So, if you plan to look at your bounce rate, you need to use the proper tools and methods because not having them could bring you to conclusions causing you to make bad decisions.
