Really?! Another Question about Bounce Rate?!?!

19 replies
  • SEO
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About Bounce Rate,

When a visitor comes to your site, fills in a form, and leaves the site, is this still calculated as a high bounce rate in Analytics?

Bounce rate = The percentage of visitors that leave your site after visiting one page.

I wouldn't care about my bounce rate if I had 1 page that made me awfully rich right?

If my goal is to get a qualified lead. I have 2 pages on my website. I have a bounce rate of 70%. But I do hit the conversion goals I set in Analytics. A high bounce rate doesn't matter right?

Or, WRONG?!
#bounce #question #rate
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Probably depends on your form. Is it doing a page load or not? Do you have a thank you page for it? If not for both, it just might count as a bounce. But even in that case you'd know why you have such a high bounce rate, and could just pay less attention to it.
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    • Profile picture of the author IamJeez
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      Probably depends on your form. Is it doing a page load or not? Do you have a thank you page for it? If not for both, it just might count as a bounce. But even in that case you'd know why you have such a high bounce rate, and could just pay less attention to it.
      There is a thank you page. So, in some cases, it's less important to focus on bounce rate right?

      For a B2B company where the website goal is to generate leads by filling out a contactform?

      I would guess a high bounce rate isnt as important.

      If somebody is searching for X, they land on the page, they get woozed by the great copy and fill in the contactform and leave. Who cares about high bounce rate?

      Yes, we have 10 other product. But whatever?!

      I am asking. And thinking out loud.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael S M
    If they fill out a contact form you (hopefully) already have their e-mail address. You can then promote your 10 other products via e-mail.

    However, if you're looking to get your site ranked on Google I'd suggest you try to get the bounce rate down.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by Michael S M View Post

      However, if you're looking to get your site ranked on Google I'd suggest you try to get the bounce rate down.

      The bounce rate in Analytics has nothing to do with rankings.
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      • Profile picture of the author IamJeez
        Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

        The bounce rate in Analytics has nothing to do with rankings.
        Isn't bounce rate one of the ways for Google to see if your site is relevant for their audience?
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        • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
          Originally Posted by IamJeez View Post

          Isn't bounce rate one of the ways for Google to see if your site is relevant for their audience?
          Absolutely not.

          First of all, Google has no idea what the bounce rate is on 60%+ of the webpages out there. Probably a lot more than that. Not everyone is using Google Analytics.

          Second, if I do a search for how to get peanut butter out of carpet, find a page that offers that, and do not look at any of the rest of the site, does that mean the site is bad? Does that mean I did not find what I was looking for? Of course not. I found exactly what I needed.

          Bounce rate is for webmasters, not Google.

          The only type of bounce rate that Google cares about is if someone finds a webpage in the search results, clicks on it, then clicks the back button and clicks on another search result. That type of bounce is signalling to Google that the first selection may not have matched what the searcher was looking for. That type of bounce rate is not tracked in Analytics.
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          • Profile picture of the author IamJeez
            Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

            Absolutely not.

            First of all, Google has no idea what the bounce rate is on 60%+ of the webpages out there. Probably a lot more than that. Not everyone is using Google Analytics.

            Second, if I do a search for how to get peanut butter out of carpet, find a page that offers that, and do not look at any of the rest of the site, does that mean the site is bad? Does that mean I did not find what I was looking for? Of course not. I found exactly what I needed.

            Bounce rate is for webmasters, not Google.

            The only type of bounce rate that Google cares about is if someone finds a webpage in the search results, clicks on it, then clicks the back button and clicks on another search result. That type of bounce is signalling to Google that the first selection may not have matched what the searcher was looking for. That type of bounce rate is not tracked in Analytics.
            Yes that is what I meant with my example about a person landing on the site, take the CTA and leave.

            I don't understand the focus on bounce rate. Or you are a blog. A blog with a hig bounce rate with a goal of getting people to read.. inform.. is probably bad.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
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    As always, I have no doubts Google is tracking on-page data besides only SERP traffic.

    Examples:
    • Embedded Youtube videos
    • Embedded Google Maps
    • Google Fonts
    • Feedburner optin forms
    • etc..

    Google Fonts alone is HUGE & most folks never even pay attention to their HTML source code. If you own a premium/payed Wordpress theme odds are every page on your site is being tracked by Google Fonts. I would even go as far as saying Google is collecting data on password protected pages that use Google Fonts.

    Open Sans font on Google Fonts served 18,176,705,571 page views last week. That's 18 billion pages in a single week for a single font, while Google Fonts includes 686 fonts, most with similar statistics.





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    • Profile picture of the author IamJeez
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      As always, I have no doubts Google is tracking on-page data besides only SERP traffic.

      Examples:
      • Embedded Youtube videos
      • Embedded Google Maps
      • Google Fonts
      • Feedburner optin forms
      • etc..

      Google Fonts alone is HUGE & most folks never even pay attention to their HTML source code. If you own a premium/payed Wordpress theme odds are every page on your site is being tracked by Google Fonts. I would even go as far as saying Google is collecting data on password protected pages that use Google Fonts.

      Open Sans font on Google Fonts served 18,176,705,571 page views last week. That's 18 billion pages in a single week for a single font, while Google Fonts includes 686 fonts, most with similar statistics.





      Hi Yukon. How is this exactly related to bounce rate? Do you mean that they do check bounce rate?
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
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        Originally Posted by IamJeez View Post

        Hi Yukon. How is this exactly related to bounce rate? Do you mean that they do check bounce rate?
        I mean Google is tracking your shoe size.

        Seriously, Google is all about data, that's why Google exist. Bounce rate is data.

        Why do you think NSA wants Google data, they want it because they know Google is tracking anything & everything on the net that comes in contact with a Google product (example list in my first comment).
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      As always, I have no doubts Google is tracking on-page data besides only SERP traffic.
      Of course they are. All of these data streams provide them with accurate overall image of the web, and that's valuable to them. Their main product is advertising, and being able to offer targeting and trend data makes their ecosystem far more valuable for their advertiser customers.

      However, I don't believe that they're using that data to rank individual sites. It'd be hard to get right, and fairly unethical. Although Google's "don't be evil" days are far behind at this point.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
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        Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

        Of course they are. All of these data streams provide them with accurate overall image of the web, and that's valuable to them. Their main product is advertising, and being able to offer targeting and trend data makes their ecosystem far more valuable for their advertiser customers.

        However, I don't believe that they're using that data to rank individual sites. It'd be hard to get right, and fairly unethical. Although Google's "don't be evil" days are far behind at this point.
        There's nothing unethical about tracking data. Odds are Warrior Forum dropped a cookie on your browser when you logged in, basically same thing Google is doing with all of their products via webmasters adding API code snippets to their own domains/pages. It's the internet, tracking is expected.

        I would be more concerned about people that think they're actions aren't being tracked online. There's nothing private about a public internet.

        I'm not trying to go all tinfoil hat just saying Google exist for the sake of collecting data & they're not creating all those free online products (ex: Google Fonts) to be nice or friendly. It's business, data is money, no point in collecting data If it's never going to be used.
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          There's nothing unethical about tracking data.
          And I said no such thing. It'd be unethical to give a boost or punish sites that use their tools, and simultaneously claim that their search was all about relevant content.
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
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            Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

            And I said no such thing. It'd be unethical to give a boost or punish sites that use their tools, and simultaneously claim that their search was all about relevant content.
            I don't see why monitoring on-page data is unethical for ranking pages. I would call it smart.

            There's a bunch of factors for ranking pages, relevancy is only a fraction of a much larger picture.
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            • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
              Originally Posted by yukon View Post

              I don't see why monitoring on-page data is unethical for ranking pages. I would call it smart.
              I think there's two different angles that I'd like to keep separate. 1) Collecting huge amounts of data, and using that to develop all their products including the search. 2) Collecting data on individual sites, and using that to rank them.

              Cutts has said that Google doesn't use Analytics data in the latter manner (as far as he knows). Of course you can't extend that to other pieces that track the visitors, but I don't see a good reason to expect that they'd do that. If they did, stuff like traffic and bounce rate would probably work for SEO.

              Originally Posted by yukon View Post

              There's a bunch of factors for ranking pages, relevancy is only a fraction of a much larger picture.
              Sorry, I was not clear. I meant their goal of bringing "relevant" articles that match the query from search user's point of view, not relevance as a ranking factor.
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  • Profile picture of the author john58975
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  • Profile picture of the author Horsecopulator
    I highly doubt as well that bounce rate comes into play when ranking individual sites. As nettiapina mentions, it's too difficult I'd reckon for Google to discern why the bounce rate is like it is for a specific site, and thus chooses not to use it.

    I'm pretty sure they use it in some other areas though, just not in matters of SEO.
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  • Profile picture of the author robertnus123
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by robertnus123 View Post

      I have been working with google analytics & it shows me high bounce rate which one of the most irritating thing for me. What should I do to reduce it? I have heard that Gostats works much better.
      Make your site suck less and your bounce rate will improve.

      Or depending on your sales funnel, maybe a high bounce rate is a good thing.
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by robertnus123 View Post

      I have been working with google analytics & it shows me high bounce rate which one of the most irritating thing for me. What should I do to reduce it? I have heard that Gostats works much better.
      Yeah, I've been reading those same spam messages too. I hope the one-note spammer got tired of posting about Gostats. Screw that guy. Hopefully he just never posts that inane crap on this forum ever again by trying to disguise it as a genuine request for help. I'm sure you hate these idiots as much as I.
      Signature
      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author seothink
    Bounce Rate never affects the ranking but site performance is must know .
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