Use Your Bounce Rate to Spend Less Money and Increase Sales

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This is a guest post by Trevor Ahlert @ semApex.com. To contribute an article simply click here

One of the most important metrics in tracking how successful your webpages are is the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures the percentage of people who leave your website without visiting any other pages. A low bounce rate means that visitors are interested in the content provided by your landing page and have decided to take further action on your site. A high bounce rate likely means that the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for and moved on to a different site.

I recently reviewed a Google Adwords campaign for a client to identify areas for improvement. I examined each keyword that the client was paying for and I looked at the bounce rate for each keyword. I was able to find one keyword in particular that stuck out. The keyword had an 85% bounce rate but it accounted for 75% of their overall advertising budget. This bounce rate told me that most likely the keyword was too broad and that a large percentage of visitors where not finding what they were looking for.

Many of the other keywords had bounce rates in the 20-30% range, meaning that the majority of the visitors were interested enough to explore the site further. Adwords can be expensive, and it is important to continually refine and narrow keywords in order to maximize profitability. I recommend that clients avoid broad keywords. Even though they can bring in a lot of traffic, often times this traffic is expensive and leads to a very low conversion rate. For example, if you bid on the keyword chairs, you will bring in visitors looking for many different types of chairs. However, if you are selling rocking chairs, and the visitor was looking for high-chairs, then it is likely that you will have wasted money on a visitor that will leave your site quickly because they didn’t find what they were searching for.

The other factor that can influence bounce rate is page design. When the visitor arrives on your landing page, is it clear what they are supposed to do? Is your design clean and well organized? Are you leading the visitor along a path to a specific action? A messy or unorganized site will confuse your visitor and cause them to leave your site prematurely. Make sure that your landing page is optimized to correlate with your ad so that the visitor has a clear and organized path to a specific action.

Bounce rate is one of the most revealing metrics available for websites and in most cases you should make an effort to continually lower this percentage as much as possible.

About The Author

I am the author of semApex.com, a blog focused on helping you find the best possible strategy for marketing your business using search engines. We are here to help you drive your site to the top of Google’s search pages and convert those visits into assets for your business. If you are looking for a short-term traffic boost, we are not your solution. semApex.com focuses exclusively on long-term strategies designed to grow your business.