Bounce Rate: a Blogger’s Business

I have been to Adgitize forum and I have observed that many are concerned about bounce rate. What does bounce rate really say about a particular site? Is a high bounce a cause for worry? What can a site owner or a blog content creator do about it?

I am not a tech savvy so I will not define it in my words. I have looked it up in Google Analytics and it says:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Based on the definition above, bounce rate is a factor that gives a hint regarding the relevance of a landing page to readers. A high bounce rate gives a hint that there is something that needs improvement in terms of presenting content or the content itself. 

I have read a comment in a web-hosting forum that bounce rate does not affect Page Rank in Google. In fact, if the site depends on running ads, a high bounce rate may mean a high CTR for the ads.

The value of bounce rate hence would depend on what kind of site you have. If you are in selling, definitely, you need to reduce your bounce rate because the conversion rate of the visits would be low, meaning that visits do not convert to purchases. Advertisers dislike that.

However, if your visitors can get the information they want or need from your landing page, a high bounce rate may not be as important in determining conversion success. For example, in blogs with short articles or dictionary sites where visitors search for words, they leave after they get the result they need, which in some cases would require only a short time. In many cases, a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean inferior presentation.

Still, it is a blogger’s business to optimize the landing page of his blog to make it attractive to readers. Relevance still is the key to make them stay longer and follow, and that is the challenge content creators need to take, survive and master.

Image above courtesy of:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/web-design-bounce-rate/