Getting Started with Bounce Rate
A big thanks to Tanya for inviting me to contribute.
As an Internet startup founder, I'm constantly thinking about how to grow my web traffic. One of the tools I can't live without is Google Analytics. Installing it is the easy part, making sense of all the data is not. One little gem I came across recently is understanding bounce rate.
In a nutshell, the bounce rate indicates how many visitors landed on your site and left instantly. In other words, it tells you how well the source sending you traffic is matched to the visitors landing page on your site.
Here's a quick overview to get started using this handy metric. From within Google Analytics, select All Traffic Sources under the Traffic Sources option. For the data to be more useful, change the Show Rows option at the bottom of the table to 500.
What you're looking for is high Visits with a low Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic and visitors are sticking around to check out your site. The opposite is also very helpful but certainly not as encouraging. Look for high Visits with a high Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic but the visitor is completely not interested in what they see.
I sort first by Bounce Rate in the last column to check for high visits/low bounce rates then sort by Visits to scan for high visits/high bounce rates.
This led me to some obvious conclusions but seeing cold, hard data made the point. Sites focused on areas related to my site send the best traffic, that is lots of visitors with a low bounce rate. At the other spectrum were the search engines, Google and Yahoo. Lots of traffic but a very high bounce rate. This means users are finding me through the search engines and hate my landing page or don't find my site useful for their search terms. The bulk of the good traffic (decent visits with a lower bounce rate) were blogs where the blog author did a write-up about my site. You'll likely be surprised by some of the sites that send you a fair amount of traffic with a low (ie, good) bounce rate.
At a glance, this tells me the gold mines are the sites focused on topics specifically related to my site followed by bloggers. As for the search engines, this is where I really need to work on my landing page and understand what search terms send visitors my way. I can change the landing page then check the bounce rate again to see if that interests more visitors.
There are many more insights and conclusions to be had with Bounce Rate but just dive right in now and get started with the basics.
As an Internet startup founder, I'm constantly thinking about how to grow my web traffic. One of the tools I can't live without is Google Analytics. Installing it is the easy part, making sense of all the data is not. One little gem I came across recently is understanding bounce rate.
In a nutshell, the bounce rate indicates how many visitors landed on your site and left instantly. In other words, it tells you how well the source sending you traffic is matched to the visitors landing page on your site.
Here's a quick overview to get started using this handy metric. From within Google Analytics, select All Traffic Sources under the Traffic Sources option. For the data to be more useful, change the Show Rows option at the bottom of the table to 500.
What you're looking for is high Visits with a low Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic and visitors are sticking around to check out your site. The opposite is also very helpful but certainly not as encouraging. Look for high Visits with a high Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic but the visitor is completely not interested in what they see.
I sort first by Bounce Rate in the last column to check for high visits/low bounce rates then sort by Visits to scan for high visits/high bounce rates.
This led me to some obvious conclusions but seeing cold, hard data made the point. Sites focused on areas related to my site send the best traffic, that is lots of visitors with a low bounce rate. At the other spectrum were the search engines, Google and Yahoo. Lots of traffic but a very high bounce rate. This means users are finding me through the search engines and hate my landing page or don't find my site useful for their search terms. The bulk of the good traffic (decent visits with a lower bounce rate) were blogs where the blog author did a write-up about my site. You'll likely be surprised by some of the sites that send you a fair amount of traffic with a low (ie, good) bounce rate.
At a glance, this tells me the gold mines are the sites focused on topics specifically related to my site followed by bloggers. As for the search engines, this is where I really need to work on my landing page and understand what search terms send visitors my way. I can change the landing page then check the bounce rate again to see if that interests more visitors.
There are many more insights and conclusions to be had with Bounce Rate but just dive right in now and get started with the basics.
posted by Kerry at
9:21 AM
1 Comments:
Great article. I applied this to a few websites on which I use Analytics and was surprised by the sources where providing the lowest bounce rate. A simple but very important stat which can really help direct the marketing effort.
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