Bounce Rate?

[IntroSites]

Tweet

Just lying in bed thinking last night, does G count bounce rates where people click your page in results page then click back to the results as a bad thing? did your page not satisfy the visitors requirements? so to G would this mean possible bad result?

Reason i ask, if your landing page opens a new window to merchant the visitor could then click back, so opening in existing window would be better if this was the case.

Any ideas?

[OLBG]

I dont know the answer but its an interesting question

I know if I were google I would try to capture this info if it was reasonably economic & feasible to do as while not perfect I think it is a good indicator of whether a site is delivering what users want for a search term

[dmorison]

Possible, but I think it's more likely that long term usage as tracked by toolbar users is more likely to be taken into account. It is quite common behaviour for a visitor to come through from a search engine referral only to go no further than the home page; but then return for a much more indepth look later on.

The other behavioural gotcha which makes me think this is unlikley, and is something I do myself as a browser; is to open the top N links for a search in new tabs, and then spend some time going through them. This would appear to the search engine as if you had rejected the first x links immediately, which is not actually the case.

[pricethat]

You could argue that if google did their job correctly the page that they sent you to would be the most relevant for the search that they are making. To somehow penalise people for not having anyone click on your site would be a little daft in my view.

Maybe within a timescale could work, so return click within x secons from clicking on the link. Could be interesting to see.

[IntroSites]

thanks, the reason i wonder is that i have started using analytics and google shows a very high bounce rate for my pages with _blank

cheers

[Shine]

If you use Google sitemaps, the stats show you what searches your site appeared for, and seperately, which terms actually resulted in clicks.

I've heard rumours of Google logging return visits to their search pages and counting that site as 'irrelevant' but I've nothing more substantial than a rumour as to whether it really happens.

I'd imagine it's quite powerful data though?