An Expert tip is not always applicable to you!
I am a follower of Avinash Kaushik on Twitter. He is a web analytics expert and generally writes good stuff, hence my interest in following him. Of course, I am not the only one who follows him (he has over 4000 followers on Twitter and around 18000 readers on his RSS feed).
Recently he wrote an article on the Google Blog about how bounce rates are important and how you can use Google Analytics to gain insight into your sites bounce profile. Now, remember the Google blog has hundreds of thousands of readers as well. While there is no doubt that the advice given in this article is very useful, I don’t think it applies to a vast majority of bloggers out there. Or at least it doesn’t apply to my blog for sure, and here is why.
A high bounce rate in Avinash’s words equates to: I came, I puked, I left. Basically, what he is saying is that if someone somehow finds a way to some part of your site, they shouldn’t just leave after reading whatever was on the page, and instead spend time looking around other parts of the site (hence clicking on links to other pages, etc. and thus reducing the bounce rate).
If you are a niche website which is drawing people purely on the basis of their interest in your subject matter, this applies. If you are a professional blogger who really needs to increase revenue, this applies. If you are a commercial website, this certainly applies. But if you are a blogger, and that too the type which forms a majority of the WWW, it may not apply (this is the type who is writing to fulfill his/her own whims, and is not necessarily concentrating on a niche).
Before I elaborate, let me talk a little about how I surf the Internet for when I am looking for specific information. I go to Google, type some keywords and press the Search button. I look at the results and open up the ones that look the most promising. This takes me to a page which hopefully has the information I am looking for. Now, two things usually happen here:
- I find what I was looking for, I read it, and I close the site.
- I don’t find what I was looking for, and I close the site.
Notice that in both cases, my activity resulted in 100% bounce rate for that site.
Now imagine a site like mine which gets more than 75% of the traffic from search engines. I would expect the same behavior as above from my visitors. They come, they look for the information; if it is what they need, the read and they go away; if they don’t find what they need, they go away.
The other thing that is noteworthy on a site like mine is that I don’t write on one specific topic. So, the chances of a visitor finding other content similar to what he/she is looking for when they visit is also little.
In fact, a much more usable metric for me is the time someone spends on my site, which tells me whether the visitors found my content useful enough to read it. So for me, a high bounce rate with a high time spent on site is totally acceptable. What it would translate to is this: I came, I found what I needed, Thank You, Good Bye.
While Avinash’s tip is bang on for people who are on the web for professional reasons, I think for people like me, it doesn’t matter.
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February 20th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Thanks for the feedback.
I do make an exception for blogs in my longer article, copying from there:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html
An Exception :
There is one obvious case where bounce rate might not cough up as many insights. I am thinking of blogs.
They are a unique beast amongst online experiences: people come mostly only to read your latest post, they’ll read it and then they’ll leave. Your bounce rates will be high because of how that metric is computed, and in this scenario that is ok.
You don’t want the bounce rate to be 98%, new visitors to your blog will still come and look around and read different posts etc. But I would not worry if my bounce rate for this blog is 50%. Maybe at 75%.
> >
But notice even in the exception I am encouraging you / others to consider that there will be some action you want people to take, even on blogs. For example sign up for your RSS feed. Or for New Visitors to read more etc.
Accepting high bounce rate sometimes (not always) translates into accepting you don’t want a longer term relationship with the Visitor.
Food for thought.
-Avinash.
February 20th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Avinash, I guess I should have read more on what you have written. Yes, I totally agree with what you say – I should still worry about bounce rate, because I want visitors to stick around. However, the point I was trying to highlight (which is what you say as well in your comment) is that for someone like me, bounce rate is not necessarily an indicator of quality of content and layout of the page….
Umm, by the way, I am really excited that you came and commented here… Thanks.
February 20th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Same here. We’d love to experiment with ideas and words and linguistic styles. If during this process we can reduce bounce rates and keep our readers, then we’d love it.
September 28th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
It’s not just blogs.
The other kind of page that can have a high bounce is one that solves a nasty little problem that the searcher is looking for. I have hundreds of those and expect people to read that one page and go on about their business.
Research activity can lead to high bounces. I do this all the time: do a search, visit the page, copy the URL and perhaps some text to remind me and then back to the search to look at the next SERP result. The pages I found may or may not be valuable to me, but my action (going back to search) is exactly the same and gives a bounce.
September 29th, 2010 at 12:34 am
Exactly.