Bounce Rates measure the percentage of visitors that access a page and leave without visiting other pages. They are a good indicator of whether the page meets the needs of your visitors or if they think it’s is a complete waste of time. If your bounce rate is a relatively low percentage, then the page is doing its job – effectively leading users to the next step.
Bounce Rates have quickly become the new killer KPI amongst web marketers… But before you decide to toss your homepage because of a high bounce rate, it’s important to understand all the drivers of a bounce.
In this article, we’ll explore bounce rates in relation to your homepage: explaining the factors that may artificially boost bounce rates and suggest how this data can be used to further refine homepage content and design.
How to Find the Bounce Rate for your Homepage:
1. Select the Content > Top Content Report from the left side menu.
Within the listing of popular page URLs there should be a forward slash, index or default URL. This is your homepage!
Your heart may quicken when you read the brutal truth – in this case, a 47.30 % bounce rate… But don’t panic. Bounce rates are only truly valuable when taken in context. Let’s dig a little deeper…
2. Click on the forward slash (or index or default url) to view a more detailed report of homepage activity
This view, the Homepage Content Detail Report, does not shed much light on the subject. But, select an option from the “Segment” menu and you’ll begin to understand why users may be bailing out.
Demystifying Bounce Rates with Segments
Three segments are particularly useful in explaining a high bounce rate:
- Source
- Keywords
- Network Location
Segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Source, in this case, reveals that direct traffic visitors (users that bookmark or type in the website URL) produce a higher bounce rate than those that access the site via Google.
It also reveals that source # 3 produces a high number of visits and that the quality of these visits is fairly poor. If you are running an advertising campaign via website source # 3 – you may want to reconsider running these ads or refining the campaign.
Segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Keyword suggests what users are hoping to see when they visit your homepage. A few years back, Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering explored the concept of “Scent Trails” & “Trigger Words”. If the trigger words that users seek appear prominently on the page, then the user feels they are on the right track and will continue along their path.
Consider the list of keywords that users are typing in to access your homepage. Does the homepage adequately reflect the keyword used? If not, should the homepage content be re-written? High bounce rates on keywords leading into your homepage may provide clues into whether or not the page is delivering relevant material.
It might also be possible that a large number of users are accessing your site with a completely irrelevant keyword. For example, non-linear creations recently published a whitepaper on the “Google Search Appliance” – this whitepaper has received a lot of interest within the web community. However, we do occasionally get traffic from irrelevant sources. Because the word “Appliance” appears in the title, we get traffic from people looking for new refrigerators, washing machines etc. Of course, because the whitepaper has nothing to do with refrigerators or washing machines, users will quickly leave and be counted as a bounce. If this is happening a lot, then it’s possible to use filters in the Google Analytics Settings to exclude this irrelevant traffic from your reports and provide a truer sense of the bounce rate.
Finally segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Network Location may reveal that irrelevant audiences have not been properly filtered. You may find that a significant proportion of traffic to your site is actually coming from your own company if all corporate IPs have not been properly filtered out. These internal users may access the site quickly and leave – artificially boosting your bounce rates.
MacGizmoGuy
May 25, 2009
@ 11:55 pm
Thanks for looking at this Bounce-Rate issue with more than just a casual “Low numbers good, high numbers bad” mentality.
For starters, effective backlink-building can build a site’s standing and rank and simply get your site spidered regularly that may not be an actual human being. Most lesser backlinks simply need to POINT in my direction as a known destination of ‘how-to-get-there’.
Spiders and Bots are NOT reported by Google Analytics in any detail needed - and which some site statistics, like GoDaddy’s basic stats clearly show. Google doesn’t seem interested in telling me how often MSNBot or YahooSlurp! comes around, imagine that!
Having AdSense on your site can skew things greatly: I get all sorts of 100% bounce, Zero time onsite, 1-time hits for LISTS of keywords and phrases that I know are not from humans and real searchers. A site may simply be intermittently getting ‘Felt-Up’ to evaluate its match against monetizable keywords - a simple Hit and Run that not only skews bounce rate - but litters Keyword analysis with machine fed phrases. (When evaluating keywords, I no longer include ANY that only have a single occurrence.)
These are but a few ways we clearly don’t need to be concerned with some arbitrary xx% ‘overall’ bounce rate. There’s just too many variables involved, and deep-thinkers will see that simply zoning in on higher traffic-time-quality sources show the TRUE bounce rate of those that ultimately matter. The devil’s in the details, not the simplistic top-level numbers.
TraiaN
June 15, 2009
@ 5:05 pm
Hi Molly,
You need to be careful when you analyze the bounce rates in Google Analytics. There are some “strange reports” in there. I wrote about them on google analytics bounce rate. Take a look.