handsonhosting
New member
For those that are not aware, there is a percentage listed inside of Google Analytics called "Bounce Rate." This essentially relates to the percentage of users that come to a website and leave after viewing just one page.
A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad things as there's a number of reasons why a visitor might only view one page. One such instance is that they arrive on your page, get the answer they need and then close the window. While you provided the information correctly to the user (hopefully), they received what they needed and then went on about their business.
At the same time, High Bounce Rates can be a sign of poorly designed/structured websites in that either the visitor is confused (and leaves), the information is not presented as it was portrayed in the search engine search (poor SEO), awful web design layout, or pricing that didn't match the users expectations.
All that said, when reviewing our SEO and Analytics for the past 30 days on our website, I felt like I was hit by a truck with the numbers that I saw. Our site only a 19.89% Bounce Rate. To understand why this was so low however, we need to look at some of the other facts and figures for our Analytics.
Our site visitors spent an average of 8:23 minutes on our site, and viewed on average 4.90 pages per visit. With 57,930 page views for the past month, 8+ minutes on the site and less than 20% bounces was a pretty nice sight to see.
Looking back at October, we again were in the 21.41% bounce rate, and 67,841 page views, but when we look at September we see only 41,237 page views but a whopping 39.81% bounce rate. Go back to August and there was only 25,709 page views but 58.37% bounce rate!! 58.37% bounces!!! That's an insanely high number!
So what did we learn from just looking back at 3 months of traffic? The very simple answer that our new website design works! Our SEO efforts are also working and targeting the right words with the right pages! We spent several months working and tweaking our website layout to get it to do just what we wanted. We're now presenting information to a wide range of users, delivering the content that they want to see, and all at the same time increasing the conversions to our checkout pages.
Some even scarier numbers when we look at keyword specific searches. Unlike the general site searches above, these are specific keywords that people are using to find our site. These are downright scary earlier in the year:
August 2012 - 4,701 page views with 88.07% Bounce rate
September 2012 - 7,407 page views with 45.43% bounce rate
October 2012 - 13,576 page views with 9.21% bounce rate
November 2012 - 13,766 page views with 8.49% bounce rate
Have you looked at your Google Analytics recently? What have you found? Are you headed in the right direction when it comes to bounce rate and providing information that your clients actually want to read and see?
A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad things as there's a number of reasons why a visitor might only view one page. One such instance is that they arrive on your page, get the answer they need and then close the window. While you provided the information correctly to the user (hopefully), they received what they needed and then went on about their business.
At the same time, High Bounce Rates can be a sign of poorly designed/structured websites in that either the visitor is confused (and leaves), the information is not presented as it was portrayed in the search engine search (poor SEO), awful web design layout, or pricing that didn't match the users expectations.
All that said, when reviewing our SEO and Analytics for the past 30 days on our website, I felt like I was hit by a truck with the numbers that I saw. Our site only a 19.89% Bounce Rate. To understand why this was so low however, we need to look at some of the other facts and figures for our Analytics.
Our site visitors spent an average of 8:23 minutes on our site, and viewed on average 4.90 pages per visit. With 57,930 page views for the past month, 8+ minutes on the site and less than 20% bounces was a pretty nice sight to see.
Looking back at October, we again were in the 21.41% bounce rate, and 67,841 page views, but when we look at September we see only 41,237 page views but a whopping 39.81% bounce rate. Go back to August and there was only 25,709 page views but 58.37% bounce rate!! 58.37% bounces!!! That's an insanely high number!
So what did we learn from just looking back at 3 months of traffic? The very simple answer that our new website design works! Our SEO efforts are also working and targeting the right words with the right pages! We spent several months working and tweaking our website layout to get it to do just what we wanted. We're now presenting information to a wide range of users, delivering the content that they want to see, and all at the same time increasing the conversions to our checkout pages.
Some even scarier numbers when we look at keyword specific searches. Unlike the general site searches above, these are specific keywords that people are using to find our site. These are downright scary earlier in the year:
August 2012 - 4,701 page views with 88.07% Bounce rate
September 2012 - 7,407 page views with 45.43% bounce rate
October 2012 - 13,576 page views with 9.21% bounce rate
November 2012 - 13,766 page views with 8.49% bounce rate
Have you looked at your Google Analytics recently? What have you found? Are you headed in the right direction when it comes to bounce rate and providing information that your clients actually want to read and see?
