Typical Bounce Rates

“I understand what bounce rate is and see the importance of it, now tell me, What is the typical Bounce Rate?”

Bounce rate has become one of the most talked about web metrics, and a lot has been written about what this metrics means and how it should be interpreted and used.

To answer this very question, a survey to understand what Bounce Rates to expect for various types of sites was conducted. The sites were classified under 6 categories, ecommerce, Product Information, Lead Generation, News/Media, Branding and Other. Other was a bucket for sites that did not fit other 5 categories, some of the sites included in “Other” where social networking, online gaming, travel search engine, tool/utility, bank and training, customer support. Since most of the sites have more than one purpose, respondents were asked to select only one category to classify theirs sites based on the main purpose of the site.

Bounce Rate Range

The table below shows the minimum and maximum bounce rates for the six categories. Bounce Rates ranged from 3.24% – 85%.

One of the possible reasons for a higher bounce rate, when home page is the top entry page, is that the home page in most of the cases is very generic and shows up in search engine results pages for keywords that might not be on the home page any more. For example an eCommerce site might have showcased an iPhone on the homepage when the site was indexed. A user searches on iPhone and lands on the sites homepage. Guess what? The site is no longer showcasing iPhone and now the product that they are showing on homepage is a Blackberry instead. What does the user, who is looking for iPhone, do? Most likely, Bounces, resulting in higher bounce rate.

Search, paid or organic, is one of the top traffic drivers for most of the sites. The bounce rate on Paid Search was higher for all the categories except for News/Media. This is alarming considering you are paying for all the visitors. The worst of all were Branding sites. I am sure when you talk to the marketing (or campaign managers) they will say that mission was accomplished since the user did come to the site even if they left without going any further. I agree that a visitors was exposed to brand but there is more that a marketers needs to think about than just getting visitors on the site (this is a topic for another post so I won’t go in details in this article).

News/Media site showed higher bounce rate for organic search then paid and lower than paid search. Again, as mentioned above possible reason is that when visitors find a new or story via search they come to a specific story and then leave after reading it, while visitors coming by paid search are either driven to home page or a landing page and expect to dive into at least another page.

Landing Pages and Bounce Rate

The question is do landing pages affect the bounce rate? Should you have a landing page? Except for lead generation sites, majority of all other site categories did not have unique landing pages for their campaigns.

There was a drop of over 25 percentage points in bounce rate when unique landing pages were used as compared to when no unique landing pages were used. I hope this gives you are reason to start thinking about having unique landing pages for your campaigns.

Summary

• Remember every site is unique so will have a unique bounce rate. Bounce rates ranged from 3.24% – 85%
• Paid search has higher bounce rate than organic search, unless you have a news/media site.
• If you top entry page is Home page then you can expect to have higher bounce rate. Using Behavioral Targeting can make your homepage a unique landing page on the fly and hence result in reducing bounce rates.
• Landing page make a significant impact on the bounce rate. Consider having a unique landing page for every campaign you run.

Tools ‹ Lotus Interactive Blog — WordPress

Tools ‹ Lotus Interactive Blog — WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Below is a comprehensive SEO Checklist of core components any new or current website should take into consideration when thinking about organic search engine rankings. This SEO Checklist covers all the core elements and gives a few high-level guidelines / hints.  The SEO Checklist is meant as a starting point, a truly comprehensive SEO strategy involves a great deal more detail and involvement.

Domain: When possible use a domain that has a search engine presence and contains relevant keywords.

Search Friendly URL’s: Avoid dynamic URL’s, URL’s should contain keywords when relevant and have a consistent flow, use hyphens instead of underscores. For example: example.com/music/artist/artist-name.php

Robots.txt: A robots.txt file should be used to tell search engine crawlers what content you do not want crawled.

Title Tag Optimization: Avoid continuous repetition, limit yourself to no more than 120 characters, order keywords by importance.

Meta Keywords: Don’t use more than a dozen keywords, keywords should revolve around page content, avoid continuous repetition.

Meta Description: Don’t use more than 225 characters, avoid continuous repetition of keywords, describe content on page.

Header Tags: Use keywords in header tags (<h1>, <h2>) to show importance and theme of a page – <h1> is the most relevant keyword, <h2> is the next…etc.

Code: Avoid heavy use of JavaScript, I-Frames, AJAX and other non-SEO friendly code.

Images: Image file name should describe what image is (e.g. cape-cod-beach.jpg), use image ALT tags for relevant keywords.

On-Page Content: More content on a page the better but use at least 300 words, content should contain relevant keywords, but do not overdue it. Limit the use of Flash. The is no content in a Flash-only site so the search engines wont know what your site is about. 

HTML Sitemap: Link to from footer, add links for primary and secondary content pages.

XML Sitemap: submit directly to search engines.

Redirects: use 301 redirect on old / unused domains.

Linking: Linking, both internal and inbound, are core to SEO success. Develop a comprehensive linking strategy that focuses on cross-linking within a website, within a network of websites and from external relevant websites. Link using keywords related to the page within the anchor text. In regards to inbound links it is quality over quantity.

Who are the Social Media Marketing Professionals?

Although Social Media has been in existence since the beginning of the Internet, it is only recently businesses have been utilizing Social Media Marketing to communicate with consumers and promote their businesses.

Social Media Marketing has most definitely become a “Buzz Term”. The ever increasing popularity of Twitter and Facebook ensure mention of Social Media often in the main stream media, bringing it to the attention of all business owners and managers.

Importance of Backlinks

If you have gained an insight into the SEO world, you would have come across the word “backlinks” several times. For those new to the SEO industry, you might wonder what backlinks are and how essential they are for the success of websites.

In short, a Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also known as inbound links and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank.

Get Found Online: Search Engines

Consumers most frequently go to the search engines to research and purchase products and services. Is your website getting found by consumers looking for you?

There are two kinds of search results: paid results and organic (or natural) results.
Paid results are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for particular keywords. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement. The price increases with the competitiveness of the keyword.

Organic results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as extent of keyword match and number of links into that website. Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it FREE, but research shows that people click on the organic results 75% of the time and paid results only 25% of the time.

Is your company or services being found? If not, Lotus Interactive can help!

How Does Google Decide?

Google and the other search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors are the biggest influencers in your website’s ranking in search engine results.

Not sure how to get the results you’re looking for or how implement SEO (search engine optimization) tactics? Lotus Interactive can help!

Outbound vs. Inbound Marketing

The Internet has changed the dynamics of the business world. For the past decades, marketers have used “outbound” marketing techniques such as trade shows and print advertising, where marketers push out a message far and wide hoping that it resonates with a few individuals. These outbound marketing methods are becoming less and less effective for two reasons:

People are getting better at blocking out interruption-based marketing messages.
The average person is inundated with thousands of outbound marketing interruptions per day and is figuring out more creative ways to block them out, including caller ID, spam filtering, and on-demand TV and radio.

The Internet presents quick and easy ways for consumers to learn and shop.
Instead of flying to a trade show across the country, for example, a consumer can go the Internet to research and purchase products or services.

Today, consumers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process. In order to remain competitive, businesses need to utilize “inbound” marketing techniques to “get found” by the consumers searching for their products and services online.

Let Lotus Interactive help you get noticed.

Social Marketing – what the heck is it anyway?

Social marketing is the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing.

Among the important marketing concepts are: