Having been in many discussions with our clients in the last few months, it seems that more businesses are starting to get smarter about their website stats. With Google Analytics being the analytics product of choice for most, getting access to useful website data has never been easier.
It is all well and good to have access to the data but when it comes to interpreting it, more skill and expertise is required. To the untrained, I guess it is a lot like looking inside the cockpit of a plane; lots of information at your fingertips but how on earth do you make sense of it to achieve what you want?
Due to the way that Google Analytics has been designed, one of the key metrics now being scrutinized is bounce rate. In very simple terms, bounce rate is the percentage of people who come onto your website and then leave straight away. Or to quote the increasingly famous Avinash Kaushik
“Bounce rate is when people get to your site, puke, and leave.”
Most people in the industry think that a high bounce rate is a bad thing. At SES London recently, experts said that bounce rates of over 50% were a worrying thing. In 99% of cases, this means several things. Either your website traffic is poorly targeted or there is something (seriously) wrong with your website design. Or worse still, both...
However, generalisation is always a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to the Internet.
When I pointed out to one of the clients that we are working with at the moment that their bounce rate had gone up, we initially thought that this was a bad thing and we needed to change the design. After all, if you've invested time and effort getting someone to your website, you want them to do something positive when they get there. After digging into the data, it turned out that although bounce rate had gone up, it seems like it is actually a good thing.
While traffic had stayed roughly the same, the users who are staying on the website were actually more interested and engaged with the website and spent more time on it, looking at more pages, more often. The changes to the design lead to an increase in bounce rate which actually filtered out the people we didn't want to attract.
Whilst it costs nothing to keep someone on your website, it is also not worth worrying about those people who have no interest in your services. Due to the size of the Internet and the way we use it, it is very possible that a good percentage of people who click on your website were never interested in what you offer anyway. It's those who are interested in what you offer who you want to engage with and keep on your website.
The ultimate goal from any online marketing campaign has to be to get the desired results. In this instance, enquiries have gone up compared to last year and the website is generating good leads for the business.
So as long as we generate enquiries, beat the targets we are set but bounce rates are higher than we want, what's the problem?
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