She was thrilled -- not only was her new paid search campaign driving traffic to her website, but it was also generating online sales! Yet closer inspection revealed that the campaign wasn't producing anywhere near the value it should have delivered. In fact, 75 percent of visitors were leaving the site immediately after arriving. In short, the site had a major bounce rate problem. As a result, the company was spending a lot of money to drive a subpar brand experience.
But our retailer friend is far from alone, as this is a problem that plagues many marketers. The good news, however, is that it is easily remedied. The key is to incorporate bounce rate analysis into your efforts to improve paid search campaign performance. By tapping into the learnings it provides, a bounce rate analysis can help you capture the right audience with the right message in the right way. Ultimately, it can help you drive further campaign growth and maximize your campaign's ROI.
Defining a bounce
So what exactly is a "bounce"? There are various ways to define one, but for the most part, it is a single-page view per visit (though certain analytics packages define it as a site visit under five seconds). Some may argue the validity of that definition considering that certain paid search campaigns have custom, stand-alone landing pages designed to convert the visitor on the first page. However, even in these situations, there is typically a call-to-action that upon click-through takes the visitor to the conversion page (e.g., order page, form submission page, download page, etc.). And in most cases, the brand typically wants the visitor to spend more than five seconds with the brand since anything less than that would be insufficient for most conversion events.
Understanding your bounce rate
Calculating your bounce rate is simple: It's the percentage of bounces among all of your site traffic. And while there are no established industry standards to indicate what would be a reasonable rate, marketers should strive to keep their bounce rates as low as possible. As Google's analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik notes, a bounce rate of more than 50 percent is "worrying." The reason should be obvious: The higher the bounce rate, the more visits to your campaign landing pages that result in a lack of conversions, engagement, and time with your brand.
Bounce rate indicators
If your paid search campaign's bounce rate is high, it may be indicative of a few things: You might be targeting or attracting the wrong audience; your message might be missing the mark; or your product or service might need adjustments. Reducing your bounce rate can improve the relevancy and impact of your marketing. Just as importantly, it will enable you to redirect wasted marketing dollars toward efforts that deliver more to your bottom line.
Bounce rate analysis basics
A bounce rate analysis can help you make more money from your paid search campaign, but it needs to be in alignment with your overarching campaign goals. Different websites and campaigns have different goals -- onsite sales, lead capture, download, call, store locator request, contest entry, video view, brand engagement, etc. -- so your bounce rate analysis needs to take that into consideration. In essence, it should not be done in a silo.
So, what can you do about poor bounce rates? Plenty. Read on for 10 tactics to help you lower your bounce rate and drive the performance of your paid search campaign.
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