Posts tagged as:

bounce rate

Big bad bounces and what to do about them.

by Tim on November 15, 2010

improve your bounce rate image There’s an ancient proverb that states “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I can never remember whether it was Confucius or Lao-tzu who said it, but in either case, the dude was onto something. The same is true for visitors to your website.

What do I mean?

Well, we all know how bad a high bounce rate can be, but what does it really mean to your business? It means that a visitor will never go a thousand miles, because they’ve never completed the first step. If you look at your Top Landing Pages in Google Analytics (or your favorite analytics tool of choice), you can see the total number of Entrances, Bounces and the Bounce Rate. But what’s missing from the report is what I call “Retained Entrances,” or the number of Entrances minus the number of Bounces. That number represents the actual number of people who can take another step into your site. There isn’t opportunity for much a journey for the other folks.

GA gives you a handy graphical way to view this, or you can calculate it manually (I recommend the former for a quick check and the latter to confirm value).

Once you know what’s going on with retained visits, you have two choices:

Fix the bounces. We’ve looked at how to fix bounce rate before here on thinks and those lessons still apply.
Make the experience even better for the people who make it past this first page. These tips can help.

While these aren’t the only ways to make your site work better for your customers, there’s no doubt they are the first step. Enjoy your journey.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
bounce rate, call-to-action, conversion, conversion rate, conversion rate optimization, E-commerce, e-commerce, ecommerce, google, Google Analytics, internet marketing, landing page design, landing page optimization, page design

Tagged as: bounce, bounce rate, E-commerce, e-commerce sales, ecommerce, ecommerce strategy

{ 1 comment }

Picking things to fix

by Tim on September 14, 2010

in E-commerce

Yesterday, I recapped the most popular e-commerce and social media marketing posts here on thinks over the last year. And, I also promised to tell you how to find – and increase – these types of pages on your site. And I like keeping my promises, so here’s how you, um, do that.

We’ve looked at finding what’s important to fix once before, but there’s another way I thought you might appreciate. Thanks to recent changes in Google Analytics, you can accomplish something similar right within GA. Here’s what you do:

First, pull up the Top Landing Pages report within the Content section of Google Analytics.
Second, click on the Comparison view. It’s the button that looks like this:
Now where’s the fun begins. You’ll have three columns within the report. The first is the Page itself. In the second column, choose Entrances and in the third, choose Bounce Rate. You’ll end up with a pretty little graph that looks like this:

(Click to see a much, much bigger version)

In this screenshot, everything green is good and everything red, not so much. Fix the highest entrance pages with the red bar on the left-hand side, and you’re back in business.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
bounce rate, call-to-action, continuous improvement, conversion, conversion rate, conversion rate optimization, E-commerce, e-commerce, ecommerce

Tagged as: bounce, bounce rate, continuous improvement, conversion, E-commerce, improve conversion

{ 0 comments }

You don’t want to grow your traffic. Not yet, anyway.

by Tim on January 26, 2010

in E-commerce

I saw a friend of mine recently and he kept talking about his company’s goal to increase traffic this year, from roughly 100,000 monthly uniques to about 125,000 unique visitors, while maintaining a consistent conversion rate. His company is betting the economy is going to turn around later this year and plans to increase search marketing to steal share from competitors.

It sounded like a decent strategy to me, but then I happened to ask him, “What’s your bounce rate?”

He had the decency to look sheepish as he answered, “44%.”

If I were the type to say, “OMG,” this would have been the moment.

Now, 44% may not sound that high to you. And, for certain types of sites (blogs come to mind), it might not be that bad. But if you’re paying for your traffic? Yikes.

Traffic, after all, is a funny thing. It’s a simple number to get your head around. And everyone knows bigger is better, right? Plus you can talk about it at business lunches and cocktail parties to impress your friends and intimidate your competitors. But the thing that makes it funny is that you don’t deposit traffic at the end of each month. You deposit profits. And if a healthy chunk of your traffic – more than 2 out of every 5 folks, in my friend’s case – leaves your site without even bothering to look around, you don’t get many opportunities to turn that traffic into profits.

By lowering his site’s bounce rate to 30%, my friend would achieve the same business goal and wouldn’t have to increase his PPC budget to do it. Sure, he’d have to pay some money to fix the problems causing the brutal bounce rate. But the benefits of an improved bounce rate continue once the funding stops. And, if he grows traffic after fixing bounce rate, then he gets even greater benefit out of the marketing spend.

I’ve taken a look at this topic in the past and recommend these 6 steps to improving bounce rate.

If your objective is to grow traffic, ask yourself why. Sure, some cases exist where focusing on traffic instead of bounce rate makes sense, but you’ve got to do the following items at the same time:

Keep bounce rate down. Seriously. I’m not kidding about this one.
Improve meaningful business metrics (sales, average order value, repeat business, CPM, etc.) along with it.
Maintain – or lower – your cost of acquisition. If your cost of acquisition is going up faster than your traffic levels, ask yourself whether you are getting enough incremental sales to cover that cost.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was this:

“When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”

Bounce rate is sometimes a deep hole to dig out of. But adding traffic to a high bounce rate site – especially if you’re paying for that traffic – is like using a backhoe instead of a shovel to keep on digging. Stop digging. And start profiting instead.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Image credit: DWRose via Flickr using Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Technorati Tags:
bounce rate, call-to-action, continuous improvement, conversion, conversion rate, E-commerce, e-commerce, e-marketing, ecommerce, internet business, internet marketing, landing page design, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing best practices, online marketing, page design, performance, ppc, ppc marketing, search engine marketing, sem