Do you remember when you were a kid and you would spend all day at some neighbor’s house bouncing up and down on their trampoline? Well that bouncing may have been a lot of fun when you were a kid, but it sure isn’t any fun when it comes to your website!
According to the Wikipedia definition a bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. What does bounce rate mean to your bottom line? If you are spending 50 cents per click from a source to send traffic to your website and it has a 50% bounce rate, you are actually spending $1.00 per click for the traffic that stays.
Now there is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.
A visitor can bounce by:
- Closing an open window or tab
- Typing a new URL
- Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site
- Session timeout
A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page, doesn't look at another page, and leaves his browser idle for longer than 30 minutes, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur.
The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of website visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits.
Avinash Kaushik from Google talking about bounce rate
So now that you know what the definition of bounce rate is, we can now look at both the traffic coming to your website and the pages where your traffic lands. Back in 2005, it was everyone’s goal to get as much traffic to their website as possible because it was thought that if enough people came to your site, the sheer volume of people would equate into leads and eventually closed transactions.
But as we all know now in 2008, just getting traffic to your site is not enough. You have to get the right kind of traffic and you have to provide them with content that makes them want to stick around. For example, if you receive 10000 clicks from one source at 60 cents per click ($6000 total spend), but the traffic has a 70% bounce rate, it means only 3,000 of those clicks are spending any time on your site. It also means that you are actually paying $2.00 per click for the customers that stay on your website.
Now let’s take that same scenario and flip the bounce rate. 10,000 clicks at 60 cents per click ($6000 total spend) with a 30% bounce rate means 7000 of the clicks are spending some amount of time on your site. It also means that your “actual” cost per click is only going up to 85 cents. Plus you are getting many more consumers exploring your website.
So when you are looking at your analytics tool, pay special attention to the old bounce rate column. A high bounce rate is obviously not good and can bring a true reality to your Cost per Click (CPC) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) spends.
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