Bounce rate on my articles is AWFUL!

[wilsonf1]

Howdy

My site is quite nicely designed im sure you'll agree.

In google analytics it reports an average bounce rate of 53% - not bad - you cant please everyone but the main pages have a much better bounce rate than that.

The problem is, I have a great guy who writes an awesome, and i mean awesome, weekly article about F1. Thoroughly researched, loads of stats, keyword rich and they rank for all sorts of terms in google.

All his articles have a bounce rate average of 90% - that is ridiculous - something must be incredibly wrong

google.co.uk/search?q=enzo+ferrari+mistress&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-45,GGGL:en

You should see enterf1.com 5th for the search term: enzo ferrari mistress

there is plenty of info about the keywords as you can see from the description in googles search results.

So why the bounce rate? Users want to find out about her so why wouldnt they read? I honestly dont think every one is expecting a photo and nothing else about her.

if you need more convincing, the article ranks well for these other terms that all seem to create a bounce:

enzo ferrari's private life
enzo's son ferrari death
interesting facts about enzo ferrari

any feedback or advice welcome

[MattSweet]

You can get a 100% bounce rate on analytics if they only visit one page. So if they read the article and then click away from the site, it can class a bounce I think. Analytics has no way to count how long they were on the page if they only visit the one.

Someone may correct me on this, but that is what I find anyway.

BTW - you've moved your site down a place on that search term... with this thread!

[wilsonf1]

true why did it do that - goes google frett if i link to the search results?!

i use statcounter.com as well and that reports 0second hits on those pages, but i think it would tell me if there were on it for 10mins the left

buggers whats up with that google ranking?!

[morleymouse]

Hi,

As matt says - if you only visit one page and leave google views it as a bounce.

In your analytics have a look at content > top content and try and find your page, it will show you time spent on page so if the time spent on page is 20 mins but a high bounce rate I wouldnt worry too much.

Remember a bounce can be someone looking at your page and then clicing adsense as that will force them to leave. It might be worth getting some 'things' at the bottom of the article, if I get to the bottom and dont want to comment theres not much for me to do appart from leave, at the bottom there isnt any adsense, links to other articles, links to the homepage etc

[wilsonf1]

here the stats for that page in may:

* 103
Page Views

* 95
Unique Views

* 00:04:27
Time on Page

* 93.62%
Bounce Rate

* 92.23%
% Exit

i'll pop an adsense unit are the last line in the article, we'll see if i gets any clicks

[wilsonf1]

BTW - you've moved your site down a place on that search term... with this thread!

im so confused - its 7th now? what has affected it?

[trevHCS]

With regards time on page stats, remember that only works if the user clicked to another page and thus can be counted. If they say go back to Google afterwards even after spending 10 mins reading a page, non of the counters will know how long they were actually sitting there.

Bounce rates can be bad, but then if someone reads the article and then disappears off they may simply have gotten the info they wanted and gone off to do something else. It's not always as bad as it appears. Only real way to track it is split the article into multiple pages and then the counters can track if someone clicked page 2 ->. To stop this annoying users you can put the first paragraph on page 1, then have the full thing on page 2 thus the stats trackers will see them move pages and be able to give you an accurate bounce and time on site stat.

As for this thread appearing above your page and yours moving down might both be related to the freshness boost. In essence new pages get boosted above their natural position for a short while to allow backlinks etc to be calculated. Then they slip back to the more logical position.

Wouldn't get too hung up on stats and just watch that the number of people visiting the site increases then you know you're doing something good.

Trev

[wilsonf1]

after some testing with my mates, i got them to enter from google, leave the page open for 10 mins then to nav to a new page, indeed it counted the visit as 10 minutes

appreciated every ones thoughts - it gave me peace of mind