Is A High Bounce Rate Always Bad?

If you have any form of contact with website reports, you will no doubt be familiar with the phrase ‘bounce rate’.  Google defines Bounce Rate as “the percentage of single-page sessions”, in other words the ratio of site visitors who came to your site and didn't go anywhere else. 

It is one of the most popular online web metrics quoted and is typically cited by website managers as good or bad depending upon the figure…. With “High” usually meaning “bad”.

But is that really the case?

Those with some understanding of bounce figures usually claim that a high rate is a sign of poor design or bad usability. That users have not found what they wanted and then gone elsewhere.

This may indeed be true, however the opposite may also be the case. You see a user may have arrived at exactly the right page they wanted (either via marketing activity or good deep-linking search engine optimisation) and got everything they wanted (such as the right information or a view of a video).

Note: If you only have a single page site, such as a microsite or a holding page for a larger forthcoming site, then you can obviously expect a very high bounce rate.

Further metrics of content marketing success

In one of my recent posts (here) I provided three important metrics for understanding the value of your content marketing efforts: bounce rate, pages per visit and returning visitors. Furthermore I said I believed that although these three figures are each individually important, when combined they are potentially even more useful.

However, there was a couple of metrics I did not include:

1. Sharing:
   It is possible to measure the use of social sharing functionality in several ways, including: the metrics provided by applications such as addthis / sharethis / etc. that usually come with their own built-in analytics or by tagging actions that integrate with your website analytics.
2. Conversions from links
   Within your website analytics package you should be able to track users from links within your content pages all the way through to them completing their required goals. This gives you another indication of the value of the content you are producing and how it is directly affecting your bottom line (note: it is even possible to tag each link with it's own specific identifier).

Have I missed any others?

Note:
You may also want to read my previous post on Content: Found, read, shared and measured, a useful way to categorise your content marketing activity.

Retention Marketing : working out the value of your efforts

We are currently working on a project to improve the retention marketing efforts for a client. But before we are able to sit down to finalise the deliverables, the client has asked us for some Key Performance Indicators that they can expect to measure our work against.

 

This is a sort of 'chicken and egg' situation, as until we have worked out what we are specifically trying to achieve and how we are going to do this, we can't decide on our actual goals and what the success criteria are. However, given I've done this sort of thing before I felt I could 'short circuit' the process and pulled together a few examples of some of the metrics I would expect to measure as part of a digital customer retention plan. Based on the assumption that the digital marketing activity is mainly going to be via email, the ones I gave were:

1. Bounce rates (site visitors and emails)

2. Share of overall website traffic
3. Conversion rates
4. Share of total conversions

 

And finally... I suggested measuring ROI (return on investment) from this activity as calculating the cost per site visit and cost per conversion generated.

 

Can anyone else suggest anything else?

Going back to Google Analytics

There comes a time in your life-long learning where you decide not to keep up with certain subjects.

The latest HTML / CSS code, the specific configuration of some lesser-used Content Management System functions and whatever is number one in the pop charts.... Are all items of information I no longer learn or retain in my brain.

And to be honest this is the same for the finer and more recent workings of Google's free website analytics package. As I've used a number of web analytics packages over the last few years, my reliance on Google Analytics has reduced and I've now realised that, along with the product updating, my understanding of the entire suite of tools within Google Analytics is not up to scratch.

I'm therefore putting my nose back into the latest version (3rd edition) of the GA bible, Advanced Web Metrics by Brian Clifton.

I think the current aim will be to wade through this book again (I used to have a version of it a couple of years back, but gave it to someone) and possibly sit the Google Analytics IQ qualification tests...... depending on how much time I actually get.