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Google Analytics Question
easyrider
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21 Sep 11 3:05 am

Google Analytics Question

What does "bounce rate" mean. I thought it was the percentage of people who immediately leave the page after arriving. However, I have some strange results that are showing up. For one of my pages today the bounce rate is 100%, but the average time on the site is almost 20 minutes. I don't understand this.
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Greg
 
thel.online.ph
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21 Sep 11 6:23 am

 Hi,

Bounce rate deals with the number of people reaching your home page or a sub-page within your website and exiting from that particular page. Bounce rate is a good indicator of determining the extent to which visitors are engaging with your website. Second, it allows you to measure the quality of your content and the quality of your web page.

A low bounce rate suggests that your site is targeting the right kind of audience and that visitors are searching through your site’s content. While a high bounce rate indicates that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they reach your site and are going back to the SERPs to continue their search.
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michellerana
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21 Sep 11 3:43 pm

 Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a site without visiting any other pages of the same site.

Bounce rates are improved if your site has great content and your articles are optimized on the right keywords. The more relevant the page is for the searcher, the lower your bounce rate will be.

Check your analytics report to find out what keywords your visitors are using or what sites they're coming from. These would give you clues as to what the majority of your visitors are looking for. Once you know that, its easier to give them what they want and reduce your bounce rate.

Analytics would also tell you what page they bounce on. If its a money page (product review page/sales page) and your visitors click through to the merchant site then a bounce isn't a bad thing! :)
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jmpruitt
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28 Sep 11 2:41 am

 if you build sites like mark teaches, you will have a high bounce rate. One thing I did that dropped mine tremendously was to start linking internally to my product reviews rather than sending people directly to a product. lowering your bounce rate this way will help your seo. Google will see people spending more time on your site, and it will increase your page views.

another good idea is to open all external links in a new window. this way they dont actually leave your site whne they click a link . they will be more likely to come back and check out other articles that you have.
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newstart
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28 Sep 11 6:46 am

 Jim Pruitt - Thank you.

I like the idea of the external links opening a new page. I have not done that on my sites. I will have to test that out, but it sounds like it should work for continued visitor participation on the site as well as SEO.
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easyrider
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30 Sep 11 1:01 pm

 I already link internally to my product reviews. And regarding having external links open in a new window, the only external links I have are my affiliate links. But I feel that a person is more likely to close the product sales page straight away if it opens as a new window. Has anyone done any testing of this?
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Greg
 
newstart
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01 Oct 11 11:58 am

 I am now in the process of testing this idea on one of my websites. I will not have this information available for probably three or four months. When I have definitive information I will make a comment on a thread somewhere.

Margene
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jmpruitt
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03 Oct 11 9:19 pm

 hey Easyrider, actually since I started doing it about a year ago, I have seen an increase in sales. I link to the products from my review pages, so those are mainly the only external links on my site, although I do occassionally add a few resource pages with links to blog posts that I recommend, and other free resources. I do this more for generating link baiting and getting some natural link building on my sites.

That is why bloggers do these top 50 posts, and top 100 type lists. Those type of posts tend to get a lot of social sharing and viral traffic.

Adding one or two of those to your AB style sites can really generate a lot of social buzz and help you to get some natural link building to your site.

I have seen my pages done like this get mentioned not only in other blog posts, but sometimes even get links in peoples ebooks (not just free ones either....if you get a link in a paid for ebook...that sends buyer leads to your site!)

also, you train your readers with your links. You have to look at whether you are training them to ignore your links by always only linking to a product, or training them to click your links by sharing valuable resources that they enjoy checking out.
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jpastorizo
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11 Oct 11 4:17 am
easyrider wrote:I already link internally to my product reviews. And regarding having external links open in a new window, the only external links I have are my affiliate links. But I feel that a person is more likely to close the product sales page straight away if it opens as a new window. Has anyone done any testing of this?


easyrider,

In your original post you said "For one of my pages today the bounce rate is 100%, but the average time on the site is almost 20 minutes." This is a good thing if the 100% bounce rate accounted for a lot of visits. Because that means that the visitor found relevant quality content that made them stay for an average of 20 minutes.

However, if the 100% bounce rate accounted for very few visits then it is possible that there was someone who was on your site for a while. In this case you have to monitor your GA stats for several days and then look at the pages of your site that had the high bounce rate and compare. It can just be an outlier.

Also, when you have a high bounce rate it is good to glance over your clickbank stats to see if the clicks data is close to the number of clicks on your site multiplied by the bounce rate - there might be a discrepancy between how clickbank reports its data and how GA reports its data but it will give you a good indication if the bounce rate was a result of your site visitor clicking on your affiliate links or clicking on the "back button". I believe when a visitor clicks on the back button it is counted in the calculation of the bounce rate (someone correct me if I am wrong).
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