As marketing data and Google Analytics are deemed so important at the moment, and poor interpretations of them can potentially lead to the creation of poor future marketing strategies and lost profits – it is important to fully understand and analyse your “Bounce rate”.
What is a website’s bounce rate?
Put simply, the Bounce Rate is the amount of visitors to a website who only look at the landing page and then leave.
General Consensus About Bounce Rate
A high Bounce Rate is typically viewed as being negative – however not everyone who only looks at the landing page should be so easily be categorised as a “Bounce”. It is therefore vitally important to carry out a more in-depth analysis of the statistics to ascertain the full picture.
What Is A Genuine Bounce?
If Dave visits a landing page, hates that it’s an outdated website, and jumps back to his search results after just five seconds – that’s a bounce to be worried about!
Dave then visits a second landing page where all he’s asked to do is enter his email to sign-up for the weekly newsletter. It takes him just 5-seconds and he jumps back to his search results. Some marketing data may deem that as a bounce but, as gathering that email may have been the primary goal of the landing page, surely it doesn’t deserve to be categorised as a Bounce.
Are your bounces due to wrong traffic problems?
If the marketing of your website and its products and services is not well-targeted – it is likely to produce a high Bounce rate.
However it is not always possible to control traffic sources and some un-targeted visitors can play havoc with Bounce rates.
An example of this would be if your website has attracted unwanted attention, such as people admiring your website design. As these people aren’t visiting you for what you sell (unless you design websites) it is likely that they won’t buy anything and will have a negative impact on your analytics.
When you discover an un-targeted traffic source like this it is good practice to ignore it when analysing your data.
Misleading Direct Entries
Direct Entries are generally people who visit your website directly, but a high percentage of these are often via search engines, making it hard for someone who doesn’t deal with analytics everyday to calculate the Bounce rate accurately.
In this scenario, it is a great idea to acquire the skills of a marketing specialist as a more accurate analysis of the data will allow you to produce a more cost-effective marketing strategy in the long run; should help you save costs and increase profits.
If understanding and analysing Bounce Rates isn’t something you’re comfortable with, the Tourism Marketing Agency will be happy to chat to you about how to get the most from your data, and use it to form your future marketing strategies.
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