An Unintended Cause of Higher Bounce Rate...
I was just reading over an interesting article about bounce rate and how to reduce it. Here is a link for reference:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237250/Reduce-Bounce-Rate-20-Things-to-Consider
(no affiliation)
But one particular point is when the author mentioned about two causes of bounce rate. The first we are familiar with:
1. You're acquiring the wrong kind of traffic to your page(s)
And the second is the one that is the subject of my post:
2. You're acquiring exactly the right kind of traffic to your page(s).
What the author was referring to here is that suppose your visitor found the exact information they were looking for on a particular page on your site, why would they need to go anywhere else on your site? They are done. You gave them the information they wanted. Unless you give a compelling reason for them to stick around, they move on. Bounce rate goes up.
I never actually considered that particular aspect of bounce rate. We always hear people address #1 above.
I won't go into the other aspects of the article as you take a look if you want. Most of the tips to reducing bounce rate are a bit general but I did find a nugget or two that I hadn't considered before. So overall a worthy read.
Best Regards,
Jim
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Thanks, never thought of it that way, makes sense.
Bookmarked this to check that link later.
I found a few helpful nuggets there myself too. Thanks for sharing, it's certainly something to think about.
Thanks Jim. I found a few little nuggets in there myself. :) New nuggets of knowledge always make me happy.
Strange one. What else are you supposed to do besides giving them what they want? I've often wondered if somebody finding the product they are looking for then clicking through to the 'buy now' link adds to your bounce rate as they are leaving your site immediately.
To be honest I've read so many different and potentially conflicting posts on this sort of thing and potentially every other aspect of IM that I just get tired and confused by it all.
I reckon the best thing is just to keep producing decent content, look for those keyword search terms, keep checking the visitor stats and if it isn't working rewrite the piece and move on to the next one.
Hey Gary,
From a purely technical sense, clicking on the buy button (that takes visitors to PayPal or other payment processor) will increase bounce rate for the page on your site. Google really should have some kind of mechanism that rewards websites for this kind of behavior as it is giving users what they want, i.e., they are looking to buy something, which makes it a conversion.
One way to somewhat get around this is to bring them back to a page after the sale and optimize that page with internal links. While this won't do anything for the bounce rate of the original sales page it could help lower the overall bounce rate of the website.
Best Regards,
Jim
I don't particularly worry about it to be honest, you can't really win because it's going to be almost impossible to bring somebody back to your site after an affiliate sale, save for opening the order link in a new window.
My bounce rate isn't particularly high - as far as I am aware - but nobody seems to really know what a good bounce rate is anyway, again it's just one of those things where one expert will tell you one thing and another will tell you something entirely different.
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Thanks for sharing Jim