Bounce Rate should be measured in two ways.
- The overall rate of the entire site
- Top landing pages
Measuring the Bounce Rate of both of these areas will help
determine which pages are leading people away from the site and not further
into it. A company’s landing page is not
necessarily their homepage. This page
could be any page that signifies the beginning of a visit. In essence, it could be any page on a Web
site as long as that is the first page a customer sees.
Landing pages may be the first impression a company provides
to the viewer. If a customer clicks on a
Facebook link for women’s yoga apparel, they may be taken directly to the
women’s section of the Web site and not the homepage. If that is the first page a customer sees,
the company needs to make sure that the content, navigation, and action items
are easy for the customer to navigate.
If not, they’ll leave the page without looking for more content and will
most likely not make a purchase.
According to Kissmetrics.com (n.d.), the average bounce rate
for a Web site is 40.5% but varies based on the industry. Similarly, the average Bounce Rate for blogs
is 40%-50% (Shafee, 2013). The James R.
Connor University Center at UW-Whitewater used this metric, in addition to time
on page, to help determine the success of their blog and make adjustments to
the layout and content provided.
James R. Connor
University Center Blog
This student union blog is almost entirely student managed
and produced. A team of 10 students from
departments across the organization post content between two and four times per
weeks. The blog topics stem from events
and connections to the University Center (including two University Center
related series posts) however; writers have creative room to write about topics
that are important to students on campus.
This content generation process creates diverse topics that may only
apply to targeted demographics on campus.
Each week, the team looks at the Web metrics for the site to evaluate the successfulness of their content. The team expects a higher Bounce Rate based on the nature of their content, but balance that metric with Time on Page to determine success. Based on the information provided, the team can gather that their content is being consumed by visitors that arrive via a direct link (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but viewers are not engaging with additional content on the site.
The team was also able to see that the “authors” page of the
site was one of the most viewed. Before
beginning the Spring 2015 semester, a side bar was added to all of the pages
that featured not only the most recent posts, but also content organized by
author. It is the team’s hope that
offering this additional information will lower the Bounce Rate of the overall
site.
Bounce Rate is a metric that provides essential information
about user engagement, but cannot be measured in isolation. Determining Web goals is essential to
defining success and should be measure across multiple metrics.
References:
Kaushik,
A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science
of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing. ISBN#
978-0470529393
Kissmetrics.com
(n.d.) Bounce rate demystified. Retrieved January 19, 2015 from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/
Shaffee,
A., (2013, December 16) What is the average bounce rate for blogs. Retrieved
from http://www.bloggingspell.com/average-bounce-rate/
