'Net Features : bounce rate

Adjusted Bounce Rate Available in Google Analytics - Web Marketers Rejoice!

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:15:00 GMT

Bounce rate is one of the best metrics available to understand if content is relevant to a user and how engaging your website is on the whole. Bounce rate, however, can be a misleading metric and for many proves insufficient to get the whole picture of the website and user experience.

Fortunately, Google is offering up a tweak to its analytics code that provides support for tracking the adjusted bounce rate. The tweak executes an event when a user has spent over a certain amount of time (ranking from 10 seconds to a few minutes for example) on a webpage. Google Analytics users themselves can decide on the right amount of time.

Once the “event” is executed, the visitor is no longer counted as a bounce even though no additional pageview is recorded. The result is that the bounce rate now shows users who have not met a required “minimal time” (the one that actually bounced as determined by you).

Overall, a very useful feature that will enable website owners to better understand user behavior and the quality of the traffic they are receiving on their website. Google did indicate however that applying this function may slow down the user experience and increase the volume of hits a site send to Google which may bring your usage over the limit of 10 million hits per month.

Optimizing the Exit Rate Metric

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:15:00 GMT

As a website marketer you should always be looking for areas to improve. Whether you are a content publisher, Internet retailer or affiliate marketer, one of the key metrics to monitor is the exit rate of your Web pages.

There is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate, but you'd be surprised how many confuse the two. Bounce rate represents the percentage of single-page visits - a user left the site from the same page (the entrance page or landing page). The Exit rate, however, indicates the percentage of visits where the page was the last one on a website that someone visited. You can see how easy it would be to confuse them.

Improving bounce rate can be achieved (in a general way) by improving the quality of a website. For example, if a content page has a high bounce rate, one option would be to include a section which features related content - enabling the user to delve deeper into that website. But improving the exit rate is a lot more complicated.

High exit rates, despite a commonly held belief that some pages should inherently have high exit rates (like subscription confirmation pages), can indeed be improved upon. And the best part? In many cases the same methods used to improve bounce rate metrics can be used to improve exit rate metrics. The aim here should be to find ways to keep users moving through the conversion funnel. If they have completed one conversion goal, then you need to present them with another. If you’re serious about exit rate optimization, that’s the only way.

So where do you start? The first step should be to identify those pages which have high exit rates and for that you'll need to do a deep dive into your analytics. Most all analytics platforms provide insights into exit rate, so it should not be difficult to find.

The second step should be to categorize the individual pages with the highest exit rates. For example, if we here at Website Magazine were to undertake the challenge of exit rate optimization, we might segment short form versus long form content pages (posts versus articles) based on the assumption that one of those ultimately has a higher exit rate than another.

One of the challenging aspects of exit rate optimization is that there might actually be a good reason for the high metric. In the case of a popular article or infographic, for example, users are driven there, consume the article and exit (leading to a high bounce rate and a high exit rate for that page). Taking the information we now know from diving into our analytics, we’re able to look at practical ways to lower the exit rate.

So how can you lower the exit rate? Simple - use segmentation data to profile content. If you know that users are coming from a search engine then you will know which keyword they used to get there (unless it's an encrypted search, of course) and when you know which keyword was searched for by the user, you are then able to segment your traffic and direct them to any number of other pages on your site where they can access more in-depth content such as whitepapers, videos, etc.

Executing this strategy can be tricky. While related content tools within a content management system or weblog platform would work well, another option would be to consider implementing exit pop-ups. That might turn off some readers, but exit pop-ups can prove useful in enticing your users with one last promotion – whether in the form of an email subscription request, gathering survey information or featuring content such as whitepapers or entire sections of a website dedicated to a specific topic.

At the end of the day, a high exit rate should indicate to you that there is something missing in your overall conversion process. When every page on your website presents an opportunity to convert users, you are in a position to generate more conversions and lower those key metrics including high bounce and exit rates.

Bounce Rate Differs From Exit Rate

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Web Analytics is fun, fascinating and important to your Web success - you know it is. It's also immensely confusing for many who get interested in measuring the actions being taken on their site. Let's look at a question that's common among those new to analytics: How does bounce rate differ from exit rate?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of exits based on entrances for that individual page.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits, that is, visits in which a user left your site from the entrance page. The bounce rate is often considered a measure of visit quality. A high bounce rate can indicate that when a user enters a landing page it is not relevant. Bounce rate can be reduced by modifying landing pages to include keywords in the copy or providing the information or services that were promised on previous pages or within ads on external sites. Bounce Rate relates to Exit Rate.

Exit Rate is the percentage of exits based on visits to the site.
Exit Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page. Exit rate is dependent on the page itself. Home or index pages should have a low exit rate while conversion completion pages (thank you pages, for example) should have a high exit rate. This metric helps determine which pages need to be improved, as it indicates the percentage of a site's total visitors who left from a particular page. Exit rate of all the pages combined consequently should add up to 100%, because all visitors will ultimately leave.

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Lower High Bounce Rates

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:53:00 GMT

Bounce rate is a key component to website success - especially for affiliate and performance marketers. If your landing pages have a bounce rate of 20-30% or thereabout, you are doing great - some small tweaks might be in order - but for the most part this is where you want to be. If your bounce rate is 50% or higher, you might need a complete restructuring of your landing pages. How do you deal with high bounce rates?