Bounce Rate Tip #2

Bounce Rate Tip #2
By Ahmed Bassel

Hello again,

It seems that I still have some time during this long weekend to open a new topic that will help us understand more and more on the data coming from the web analytictool we are using.

In my previous post I talked about conversion ratio and how important it is, today I will discuss one of the elements that are related somehow to the conversion, it's the bounce rate.

Bouncing occurs according to Wikipedia when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses.

Bounce rate can occur due to several elements, such as:

• Closing the window or tab
• Typing new URL in the browser
• Leaving the page open for more than 30 minutes which cause session timeout
• Hitting back button of the browser

Well, theoretically it's right but there is a lot more you need to know before you have a 100% confidence on this.

In other words bouncing occurs if a user or visitor entered your site by mistake or entered your website from a running campaign that has misleading message or any other reason that made your visitor bounce of the page before taking any action within let's say 10 seconds (most analytic geeks think this is fair enough to decide if you found what you are looking for).

Below are more reasons for bouncing:

• If a user is referred by search engine organic results, the meat data such as the title tag and the description tag are not giving clear message of what the user want.
• Users who clicked on the paid listing assuming that these links will send them to the right place.
• Having a link in other directories or websites and blogs with wrong message.
• Bad content of your website.
• Your website design is not credible enough to gain user engagement.

You can start measuring your Bounce Rate using the below formula:

Bounce Rate for specific page = Unique visitors to that page with less than 10 seconds / Total of Unique visitors to that page.

Ok, now let's apply this to the previous example I used in conversion ratio tip #1 post. Let's say you have 100 unique visits and a conversion of 10% with $50 sales since the item cost $5. Let's say that you have a 30% bounce rate then in this case you've lost 30% of your potential customers who were maybe converted into sales.

Conversion ratio could be affected to many several elements than bounce rate, in later posts I will go into deep details on this issue.

Ahmed Bassel is the Creative & Media manager at Linkonline a wholly owned subsidiary of LINKdotNET. He is also the author of Any Questions? Personal blog where he answers all questions related to web design, web analytics, internet marketing, and SEO questions and inquires.

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