Dirty Little Secret? Sexy Metrics? Who knew SEO and PPC were so naughty…
I read an interesting article today over at TechLINKS.net called “Search Marketing’s Dirty Little Secret…” by Emil Walcek. In it he suggests that money spent on search engine marketing, while driving more traffic to your website, could actually be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Imagine, if you will, a website that is flush with keywords, every page title is full of promise, every image has a descriptive ALT tag. It has been submitted to all the major search engines, you have partners and press releases pointing to it from all four corners of the world wide web. You have more unique new visitors every month than ever before in the history of your website. Your Google ads are generating clicks, and you’re even tracking conversions with something like Salesforce for Google Adwords. But here is the big question…
What’s your bounce rate?
Google Analytics defines bounce rate as “… the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”
In his MarketingProfs Daily Fix, blogger Avinash Kaushik describes bounce rate as the “sexiest web metric ever.” He says that bounce rate, from the perspective of the person who ‘bounced’ is “…I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.” That sounds about right.
Do you have a lot of traffic hitting your home page or pay-per-click landing page, but then leaving quickly, and without visiting any other pages? That’s a lot of money spent on PPC or with that SEO specialist that is just going to waste.
Clicks, conversions and unique new visitors are all metrics to be prized, but bounce rate could be the single most important thing you should be monitoring with your web analytics tools.
