For many people, the word “statistics” generates instant
skepticism. It evokes the idea of incomprehensible
amounts of data, carefully massaged in order present
someone’s case. If you have a company website, however,
it pays to develop a friendly relationship with its
traffic statistics.This
article is a discussion of the Bounce Rate Report,
available in Blizzard Tracker. “Bounce rate” is the percentage of website
visitors who arrive at an entry page, then leave without
getting any deeper into the site.
Take a look at this sample report from Blizzard Tracker
Professional Edition. It represents one day of traffic
for a fictional hotel website. 481 visitors landed on the home page as an entry page into the site, and 157 of
them left without visiting any other pages. Thus, the
bounce rate was 33%, which is not bad. Keep in mind,
however, that if your bounce rate is significantly over
50%, you should research the cause.
One possible cause of a high bounce rate is an outdated
design. A Blizzard Tracker subscriber recently told me,
“The bounce rate on our old site was sixty to eighty
percent. We saw that and said, ‘Something has got to be
done. We are losing too many people.’” After a redesign
of the website, the bounce rate for their home page in May
2004 was 33%.
Think about the additional business you can get by
reducing your bounce rate. If your home page is viewed
by 200 visitors per day, and you lower your bounce rate
from 60% to 35%, you have increased your visitor
retention on the site by 50 visitors per day.
Relevance is another factor that can influence bounce
rate. If a visitor doesn’t think your site is relevant
to her search, she will leave. Your tracker reports will
tell you what keyword phrases are being used to find
your site, in overall numbers and also per visitor. You
will likely find that the more specific, targeted
phrases perform better than general terms in bringing
the right visitors to your site. Those are the terms to
prioritize when optimizing your website and planning
your promotion campaigns. Then, make sure that your
entry pages provide the content your visitor is seeking.
Some of the entry pages in the report may surprise you.
Often, interior pages are not designed to provide the
optimum landing experience for first-time visitors to
your site. If the search engines have spidered your site
and indexed most of your pages, that’s wonderful.
However, you might discover that some visitors are
landing on a page with sparse information or limited
appeal – for example, your “contact us” page. If this is
the case, think about enhancing the content and
providing an appealing link to your home page.
I’ll close with an example of a visitor report
for this website. Here is
a visitor from Indonesia who used the very general term
“blizzard” to arrive at the
www.blizzardtracker.com site, and bounced. Although
we would like to think that we are world-famous, this
person did not find what he was looking for on our site.
