Why you need to understand bounce rates
by Brian Turner
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!
Bounce rates were a hot topic at the Edinburgh SEO Class, and the consensus among the SEO’s discussing it was that Google are using bounce rates to re-order search results.
This isn’t a surprise - heck, a few years ago I wrote about how Google could use human user data to modify their results pages (SERPs), and I blogged last December on how I thought I was seeing bounce rates already being used in Google.
What’s a bounce rate? Simply put, how quickly it takes visitors to leave your website, usually defined as a percentage.
A simple definition is the percentage of visitors who land on your site and then leave without viewing any other pages. Some definitions within analytics provide a time parameter, defining a bounce as someone who lands on your site and then leaves within 10 seconds.
Google can track bounce rates, both by visitor tracking on Google search results - not least how quickly a user clicks through a result and then clicks back to Google - plus a whole array of data collection tools such as analytics on the websites you visit, data from Adsense where used, and any other channels Google can tap data directly from.
As we’ve seen above, if Google really are using bounce rates for at least reordering top positions (and this should be presumed to be happening in practice), then it’s really important to address it.
There are a couple of different strategies for trying to tackle this:
1. Prevent easy exit
Offer a poll or questionnaire to visitors who try and click back off your page, to try and hold them over the 10 second threshold.
This isn’t really addressing the user problem, though, and should probably be considered “blackhat” as it’s trying to address a technical solution to a technical symptom in order to fool tracking, rather than the human user cause.
2. Great page snippets
You should already be trying to control the snippet Google returns in search results, with clearly useful page title, meta-description or page content excerpt, and relevant URL.
However, Jim Boykin has made the interesting observation that you also need actionable words in your content.
In other words, promote offers, discounts, and sales messages on why you should act now in your snippet. In short, a continuation of the principle of treating natural listings as like PPC ads (something I’ve been advising for a long time now).
3. Properly engage visitors
This is something that should also be integral to your marketing - as I’ve said time and time again, there’s no point ranking for something on Google if you deliver a crap user experience and everyone leaves your site disappointed.
While it may be more challenging for ecommerce sites to play with content, for informational sites there can be lots of room to work with interlinking relevant topics and articles.
Maki does an excellent job of exploring bounce rates, and especially uses the BBC news website as an example publisher model of how to do many things right: for continuing to engage users and keep them on your website.
Overall, if you’ve not considered bounce rates yet, you absolutely should consider it. You don’t need to be an analytics guru to tackle it - just make every effort to build a good user experience.
Discuss this in the Internet Business forums
Story link: Why you need to understand bounce rates
Add to Bookmarks:
Related stories:
6 Responses to “Why you need to understand bounce rates”
Leave a Reply
Previous: « Secrets of Advanced SEO revealed
Next: Bad economic news is good marketing news »
Visited 1632 times, 6 so far today
Nice article, Brian. I haven’t heard the 10 second rule before. Is that from an official source or from your own observations?
No problem and welcome. :)
The 10 seconds isn’t so much a rule, as much as in conversation with analytics people they sometimes use a specific time frame to profile user activity.
For example, Google Analytics treats a bounce as a single page view before exiting. But if running a dictionary site, that’s probably all the visitor needed. So is a high bounce rate there good or bad?
There’s a lot of room for subjective reading into analytics which can be very site specific.
For example, on a general reference site, if a bounce occurs only after 30 seconds, is that because the user found it hard to access the info they needed, or does it mean they looked at other options for surfing deeper into the site, but then decided against it?
Neither bounce rates nor analytics tell you much about user intent, so there remains a lot of room to add profiling parameters to experiment with to try and determine this.
2c. :)
Thanks for the welcome :-)
Yep, analytics isn’t an exact science for sure. I tend to ignore the actual numbers (or precentages in the case of bounce rates) but do look out for big discepancies between pages. So if one page is getting a 15 or 20% higer bounce rate than most of the others, I trust its a very good indicator that there’s a problem somewhere with the content on that page.
Indeed, I think one of the discussion pointers that came up at SEO Class was just how Google could use bounce rates as a reliable metric, when there are obviously other factors that could skew bounce rates under normal conditions.
I think you’ve banged the nail on the head though, by way of big discrepancies between pages - in other words, Google looking for abnormal signals it would be hard to ignore.
I have to say that your SEO advice is far better than your pre-packed sandwiches.
Here’s hoping that remains the case - my sandwiches are pretty good. ;)