I came, I puked, I left. Exploring the bounce rate and what it means for your nonprofit.
The bounce rate -- it's kind of like the "bleh" factor for your site.
Ever wonder what that bounce rate in your Google Analytics is all about? It’s a question I’ve gotten more than once and today I’d like to look into it and talk about what it means specifically to nonprofits.
A textbook (and not so textbook) definition.
The bounce rate is the number of people who landed on a page on your site and then left after viewing only one page. In other words, it’s a measure of how many folks are not sticking around to explore your website.
As Google guru Avinash Kaushik jokes in this video, it’s a measure how many people are coming to your site and having this experience — “I came, I puked, I left.”
So what’s a good bounce rate, and should I be concerned if mine isn’t ship-shape?
Short answer — it depends. It depends on what type of site you have, and what your goals are.
In the video above Kaushik notes that having a bounce rate of between 40 and 60% is pretty standard. However, there are certain types of websites where having a high bounce rate is not a bad thing. Take for example a blog like this one or a nonprofit website that’s more about sharing information than getting people to undergo transactions like mcf.org.
In these scenarios a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily an indicator of a poor visitor experience — instead the experience might go, “I came, I saw exactly what I wanted, I left happy.” It might be an indicator of the info on your site being indexed by search engines well, and people finding helpful information without needing to click anywhere else (that being said, it is nice when people stick around…)
Okay, what can my bounce rate really tell me?
If you have a site where your goal is to encourage people to stick around and undertake a transaction, like signing up for a program, or contacting you about your services, or making a donation to your cause, then a high rate can suggest a couple of useful conclusions.
- Your content’s not that great — Consider tweaking your copy to make a better case for your organization, or try new ways of telling your story like video.
- You should optimize your site for search engines – In a real sense the Bounce Rate is a measure of your site visitor’s expectations being fulfilled. Are they seeing what they wanted on their screen? If a search brought someone to your site, and you’ve got great copy but folks are still abandoning ship, maybe you’re not zeroing in on the people who are really your target audience. Maybe people are finding you when they search for women’s shelter, but are they looking for a women’s shelter in Minnesota? Consider taking steps to improve SEO like changing (or beginning to use!) meta tags, or explore using Google AdWords to attract the right people to you.
- You’re wasting your money on the wrong AdWords — If you’re using Google Grants or purchasing AdWords on your own to try to get traffic to your site, the terms you’re buying may be less than fabulous. Discontinue the ineffective ones and pour more fuel on the ones that work.
Finally, something to have in the back of your mind as you look at your bounce rate is to realize that not all of your most important transactions are necessarily occurring on your site. If your organization is like many nonprofits, you may be using a site like GiveMN or eTapestry to collect donations.
So, someone coming to your site to make a donation might land on your homepage, go straight to your “donate” button, and leave your site to make a donation using your collection portal. This for you is obviously a SLAM DUNK, but Google will read that action as bounce with a capital “B”. Yet another reason why it’s good to be using Google Analytic’s tracking code to catch the important traffic that goes from your site to other places on the web.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Meghan Wilker, Cary Lenore Walski. Cary Lenore Walski said: Veni. Vidi. Puke-y. The google bounce rate & what it means for your #nonprofit – http://bit.ly/d70FbR #analytics [...]
Bounce rate of our personal blogs improved when having only ‘teasers’ (intro paragraphs) on the blog homepage (using the WordPress ‘more-link’ facility), so if a visitor arrived on homepage they were more likely to click through to a post detail, thus not ‘bouncing’.
I’m sure lots of visitors enjoy your posts Carey, but can you tell how many read the entire homepage then leave against those who “Veni. Vidi. Puke-y”?
Cheers – Andy
Thanks for commenting, Andy. Having a teaser for each post on your homepage is an excellent idea. It allows you not only to improve your bounce rate, but also to see to some extent which posts are more popular than others — a thing that’s lost otherwise because there’s no way to tell using Google Analytics where people have lingered on your homepage.
With the tools of Google Analytics, I think the best way to measure how many people read the entire homepage (or at least a significant amount of the content on your post), is to look not at the bounce rate, but instead at time on site as your measure of audience engagement. So, you might say that someone who is highly engaged in your content spends at least a minute on your blog.
Once you’ve determined this, you can use Google Analytic’s Goal feature to set up a goal that will track how many people spend a minute or more on your site. With this measure, you can then track if you have people spending more time on your site over time and what content tends to make them stay longer and be more highly engaged in what you present.