Hi I’m Brent Curry, a search marketing specialist with Tiny Frog Technologies.
Today is the fourth video in our four-part series about Google Analytics. I wanna talk a little bit about bounce rate today because I’ve received a number of question about bounce rates in the past.
What is bounce rate?
Why is my bounce rate so high?
What does my bounce rate really mean to me?
So the first thing about bounce rate you need to understand is the measurement. What bounce rate is is basically a statistics telling you how many people come to the website and then leave without interacting with the site in any other way. So basically what they do is land on a a page, and then leave before doing anything else.
Think about the way the software program works – if we want to measure how long someone has been on the site etc. we need two data points. So this tells us is these are visitors with only have one data point, they enter the site and they left they didn’t click on anything. That being said we can’t tell how long they actually stayed on that page. That particular visitor could have been on that page for a minute and a half – and they found everything that they were looking for…or not – just something to think about.
Bounce rates tend to be high in general because there’s just a natural amount on people who are coming to the site who really aren’t qualified which mean they aren’t going to be that engaged on the site. However, it really is specific to your industry there is no best practice or average standard that you can point to. You can begin to look at the data from your own site to understand what it means to your company.
Now I’ll give you an example…
One question a client asked me “do you know why is my bounce rate is (lets say it was 45 percent) why is it so high?” We started taking a look at the data in this particular client sells home heating oil to users in New England and we found that what was happening is that there was a large number of people who have bookmarked the pricing page and they would just check the pricing page. Some of them were visiting 10 times or more per month just hitting the pricing page and leaving, hitting the pricing page and leaving each one of those being a bounce rate. So when we normalize the data and removed that we found that is actual bounce rate for other visitors with closer to 30 percent which was actually really phenomenal because most sites don’t get that.
So you can begin to look at the data understand what your bounce rate means, and why it’s so high for your site. If you start digging through the report you can get some of those answers but hopefully this helps explain it a little bit to you. S
So once again, Brent Curry with Tiny Frog Technologies if you have any questions about Search Engine Marketing just let us know.
