Bounce Rates, Bounce Rates, and More Bounce Rates

Most of the people leaving entrecard always have this word in their mouth: BOUNCE RATE. They always complain that the traffic it produces is junk simply because they have lots of bounce rates which makes their blog stats ugly. I’m one of the guys who actually believed that bounce rates can really damage my blog’s performance leading to no search engine appreciation at all. But instead of removing my entrecard, I still cling on because of one reason. Most of my traffic comes from entrecard. And it’s like, remove it and my blog will die. That was until I read this post by Turnip – Idiots and Bounce Rates – and it somehow altered my perspective regarding bounce rates, but not entirely.

Basically, bounce rates, from my research, have two possible definitions. One is how long a visitor stays in your page, the lesser it is the more it is conceived as a bounce rate (if it’s 15 sec or less). The other is the number of page views your visitor made while in your site. If one, then it’s also a bounce. Bounce rates, along with several other factors about your website, are used by search engines to measure your visitor’s "engagement" to your site. (You can see more of it, if you have a metric tool that measures your visitor’s activities in your site, such as Google Analytics). Now, most of these discontented entrecarders might have thought that the bounce rates they are getting suggest that entrecarders are just dropping by with an absence of “engagement” on their part. How these people arrived to their conclusion is based on the metric tools installed in their blogs to see the performance of their site. Perhaps it is true, but there must be some other explanations regarding high bounce rates.

For the most part, information produced by metric tools about your site can produce inaccuracies as well. User engagement, I believe can’t be entirely explained by numbers alone. These tools, although a critical tool for some, can only put together a few pieces of the whole puzzle. You could have a visitor which could register lots of page views and a longer time spent on your site but that doesn’t mean this particular visitor found the answer he/she was looking for. Maybe this visitor doesn’t even have a clue why he’s in your site, in the first place. Also, you could have lots of single page view visits but that doesn’t mean there’s no quality in it. These visitors could have been reading your post for an hour and a half but these metric tools will register the time they spent reading on your site as “0” simply because it has no way of knowing how long that visitor has been there without accessing another of your page as reference.

Additionally, the advent of tabbed browsing did a lot of mess to the computations of these metric tools. Let’s take for example I got to your site from entrecard. Suddenly, I noticed a banner about a contest and immediately clicked on it to open in a new tab (which I always do). And then after a few seconds, I saw a good headline in your “popular posts” and decided to click it in a new tab again. I then decided to read each of the 3 tabs I opened. As you can see I’m really engaging with your blog; but with the metrics, it will only register as three page views with a time spent as somewhere under 10 seconds. Very poor calculation as compared to the actual time I spent to try and comprehend your site. That’s the reason why you shouldn’t completely place your blogs value on the metric tools alone since more often than not it’s very far from the reality. To fully understand how these metric tools measure the time spent on your page and site, see this article: Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site

Also, other social networking sites, besides entrecard, are one of the main culprits for huge bounce rates websites get. Digg, Stumble, and several other social media traffic are usually one time drop only. This is because they will only try to read or scan through your post or blog if it’s worth their review and vote or not. Perhaps it’s possible that some of these entrecard users are submitting your posts to these social medias which in turn gives you traffic that are always bouncing.

With these things in mind, I would say you shouldn’t be that worried about bounce rates. Of course, it’s worth looking for some loopholes in your blog design, navigation, and content etc; but if all of these are okay, then maybe your subscribers and comments will tell a different story don’t you think? Finally, here are some helpful articles about bounce rates and stuff: Stop Whining About Bounce Rates; Bounce Rate as a Ranking Signal; Measuring Visitor Engagement: Tools + Tips; How to Reduce Entrecard’s High Bounce Rate.

If in any way you felt that I'm wrong about something, or just want to add to the conversation, please leave a comment below. Thanks.



technorati tags: bounce rate, metrics, web analytics

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