Bounce rate - Bounce rate refers to the rate at which visitors leave your Web
site or a page on your website without really examining its contents or
completing a transaction. Bounce rate is therefore a measure of Web site quality
and some Search Engine Optimization experts believe it may be used by search
engines to determine the quality of your site. The term is used in different
ways by different SEO practitioners and often is used without having a specific
definition in mind.
There are two principle ways of measuring bounce rate. The first is the
number of visitors who only visit a single page in a website and leave. The
assumption is that this page is the intended
landing page, but
not the final destination that the designer intended for the visitors. They came
to the shop and browsed, but didn't buy.
The
second is the proportion of visitors who spend an extremely brief time on a page
or at your site before leaving. These measures may have different meanings, and
they may not always mean what we think they mean. Surveys and other methods of
determining why visitors do what they do are not necessarily reliable because
the sample of visitors who choose to respond to surveys is inherently biased.
The non-cooperative ones just don't cooperate at all.
If most visitors seem to be spending less than 5 or 10 seconds on a page and
leaving, it may be that the statistics are including web spiders and robots
rather than just human visitors, or the page may be a table of contents or links
page, or they may really be leaving because they are not interested in the
information on that page or at the site.
Single page visits are supposed to be a sign of poor design, but that may
depend on the nature of a Web site and what visitors are likely to be doing
there. If I simply want to find the name of Abraham Lincoln's wife I may look up
[Abraham Lincoln] in Google, go to the first site listed which is probably
Wikipedia and close
the page after five seconds because I have gotten the information. That doesn't
mean Wikipedia is a bad website or that the page is not useful or properly
designed. You may be reading this page because you wanted to find out what
bounce rate is, and you may have no other interest in this website at present.
Of course, for online businesses a single page visit that does not result in a
sale reduces
Conversion Rate
, and it is therefore important. But not all websites are selling something. A
single page visit may result from clicking on a link to a single news item that
is of interest, for example.
On the other hand, a visitor may forget to close a page and leave it open in a
tab for hours, even if they glanced at it and found the information there to be
worthless. Or, in a poorly designed site, a visitor may click through to several
different pages before finding what they were really looking for. Without
data that extensively track the behavior of visitors for different types of
websites, the meaning of "bounce rate" is not as clear as one might think.
Alexa and some other similar tools that survey website quality and visitors
may take into account "bounce rate" as a quality factor. Alexa does it by
checking pageviews per visitor, on the assumption that if a visitor only looks
at one page that is a sign of failure and less preferable to sites where
visitors click through to other pages. The assumption that pageview ratios
reflect quality is questionable, especially since in may experience, Alexa
consistently and significantly underestimates the pageview ratio.
Strategies that assume that search engines check bounce rates
of pages also assume of course that search engines have an accurate means of
tracking behavior. Google may do so through its Google analytics software if
your site uses Google Analytics, or it may use its personalization information
and the technology that it acquired when it purchased Doubleclick, but most
sites do not use Google analytics and it is not clear how well these tools
really reflect visitor behavior.
