Bounce Rates???

[tomj]

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Hi All,

I'm going blind looking at website stats and my home pages wondering what I can do to get my bounce rate down and people clicking more around my pages...

Currently heres my stats for one of my retail related sites for bounce rate from SEO traffic only year to date:

21/6 thru 21/7 - 38.5%
21/5 thru 21/6 - 38.9%
21/4 thru 21/5 - 34.9%
21/3 thru 21/4 - 37.1%
21/2 thru 21/3 - 33.7%
21/1 thru 21/2 - 36.3%
21/12 thru 21/1 - 33.6%

Dont ask why i went from 21st as I just realised this myself


Basically how do your bounce rates stack up for PPC traffic or SEO ?...Do you think I'm doing quite well to be only losing the amount of users I am currently without them exploring further?

Btw, I also dont have any opportunity for traffic leakage via paid ads or any other advertising on the index page.

Cheers, T

[MarkCo]

To me these look high. But I guess it depends on what the visitors are looking for and when they arrive at your site.... do they find what they want.

I would be interested to hear what others think...

[globalmedia]

Hi

Your bounce rates are really specify to where the person lands as mentioned, if these are for your homepage look at what is generating the traffic and do analysis from there it could terms that you don't have products for (broad match type terms) or very general terms that you might sell but don't have obvious placement on the home page for, also look at new and returning visitors if you have a high level of new, and a matching high bounce rate there is something putting people off the site.

The old statistics rumour is that people make there mind up about a site within 20 seconds of arriving. A zero bounce rate is what we all look to achieve but for a homepage for me 20-25% woud be acceptable, product based pages below 20%.

[D-Mac]

One of my sites has a bounce rate of 16.79% over the last month, but is receiving most of its traffic from clickthrus from another of my sites that gets its traffic via SEO and has a bounce rate of 55.37%.

SEO traffic generally has a higher bounce rate then PPC (or other targeted traffic). With PPC you could look at which keywords have a poor bounce rate and either delete them, or send users to pages with content more targeted towards these keywords (or use the referrer info to dynamically change bits of the page according to the keyword used).

With SEO looking at the overall bounce rate isn't particularly helpful as you have less control over the longtail keywords, which may be skewing the headline figure. You need to drill down to really be able to draw any meaningful conclusions.

[moredial]

Bounce rate is an unexplained term. Does it mean that your page is so well focused and relevant that the visitor found all their answers on the page, or that the page has no relevance to what the visitor was searching for?

To get a meaningful answer, you need to go back to the raw logs and analyse which search terms are being used and follow the path for each visitor that does convert.

Who cares if you have a 90% bounce rate if the remaining 10% all convert and make your site profitable?

The solution is to SEO your site so that it increases in relevance for those search terms which do convert and you spend less money on bandwidth for non relevant searches by decreasing those words on your site.

If you have high google traffic, it could be that the inbound links have been badly written and that is making you appear to be relevant for something that does not apply when your content is viewed.