The Curse of the KPI … the bounce and the visitor

I blame Avinash,  and Google generally for the general perception of the bounce rate being a bad thing, don’t get my wrong – it is, or could be better – but as a rule a bounce means they came, they left – nothing else was recorded (that would affect the bounce rate)…
Does this mean they found the content good or bad, the fact they didn’t go any further after coming in on a content page may mean they were extremely satisfied… or alternatively they came, they hated they left – unless something else is recorded – how can you know?
But the problem is that people seem to think that a blog post with a high bounce rate is a bad thing – its a metric and nothing more – if the point of the blog was to encourage them to download a (tracked) whitepaper, to fill in a (tracked) contact form, or to engage with the site in some other way then obviously it is a bad thing – but if its literally just a post on say the bounce rate …
My point is we can do better – we can start to look at visitors  – it can be confusing to think of visit vs visitor metrics but think of it in a real world situation – If I pop into currys four times and buy once  – well, I am only one visitor with four visits, my visit conversion rate is 25% but as a visitor I am a buyer. Hopefully that makes sense, in the online world this currently is usually limited to one browser on one device.
So my point about bouncers – let us look at engagement metrics such as frequency and recency to really start to paint the picture – are people coming back to your blog time and again or once seen, never again – for many blogs you want to build a loyal following of enaged people from your target market.
Most analytics packages will allow you to look at this and one of the buzz words of 2011 was attribution, it basically means distributing the source attribution out to all the different providers of traffic for that visitor, which contributed to a conversion.
Finally one more point – segment! Broad KPIs aren’t great – segmentation is key – your bounce rate – compare it to similar pages , not navigation pages vs product pages – if you can segment by your target country , mobile, anything  that will make a difference…
Analytics in 2012 is all about actionable insights – and this can only really be done based on accurate data, so make sure it is totally right.

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