Count for me the many reasons why I will leave your web-site the second that I land there. Did you blast me with music with no clear mute option? Did you annoy me with flash to demonstrate how cool you are? Were you careless with site design and I’m met with confusing graphics and little direction? How many ways have you “bounced” a visitor and how will you ever know why?

Analyzing Your Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate indicates whether you got your visitor’s attention or or if they immediately clicked off, data which will go far in determining your blog marketing ROI.

Avinash Kaushik of MarketingProfs.com:

“Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your Web site. It is almost instantly accessible in any Web analytics tool. It is easy to understand and hard to misunderstand, and it can be applied to any of your efforts.
[...]
Bounce rate measures quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your Web site is failing your Web site visitors.

It is usually measured in two ways:

1. The percentage of Web site visitors who see just one page on your site.
2. The percentage of Web site visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

Either definition is fine; each has its own nuance. Check what your tool’s definition is.”

By understanding your bounce rate, you’ll be able to see how successful your site is in engaging your reader. Through bounce data you can determine possible bad traffic sources, correlate high bounces with site changes that may have had a detrimental effect or tie your data in with a specific blog promotion that held your visitor’s attention.

“Check to see if the right calls to action are on the page. Is the content optimally organized? If the above pages are your campaign landing pages (for direct marketing or paid search campaigns), then consider whether they are delivering on the promise of the email piece you had sent out or the search keyword. Answer these questions, and consider multivariate testing to improve page performance.”
(Source)

The link above will take you to a thorough examination of how to use this metric to your advantage on an ongoing basis.

Tags: bad_traffic, Blog Marketing, blog-promotions, bounce, direct_marketing, marketing_roi, search_campaigns, web_analytics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing, Blog Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.