What is your Bounce Rate?
 

What is your Bounce Rate?

I've read some forum admins have a high 70% bounce rate. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

If you are one of them - you have a serious problem.

Post the following: (for comparison use stats for the following dates: Aug 31 - Sept 30 2008)

• Overall site bounce rate
• Main page (ie. portal) bounce rate
• Forum index page bounce rate
• URL (optional)

The goal of this thread is to discuss ideas, offer solutions, and issues that may cause high rates.

When i first started using analytics my bounce rate was as high as 80% in some areas :shock:!

After getting some feedback, and data from what people were looking at, I pretty much completely overhauled my site. Started with getting a new design, then getting better content, since then my drop rate has been in the low to mid 30's pretty much site wide ever since then.

My bounce rate for one of my forums is 37.17%. The other is a high 66.67%.

my bounce rate must be 100%... people come on my site and leave when satisfied quickly.. lol

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my friend Rich will be happy, his bounce rate for WTS in the last 2 weeks is 9.95%... 74.24% direct trafic

on nexialys.net, the rate is 55.95% for the last week because i closed the site and changed to a sub-domain... 44% direct trafic (indexed a lot)

TB, my theology board is at 33.27% for 78% of direct trafic...

It's 36.8% overall for my site. Only 14% on my forums index page, and 32% for my main site page.

for the past 30 days (Sept 1, 2008 - Oct 1, 2008)

41% New Visits

40% Overall
17% Main index (portal)
18% Forum index
4% Mods
4% Styles
6% Articles

going by the numbers above, the Main index page should be in the low single digits for a site that does not have any ads .. this tells me that the portal page needs improvement (there's nothing there that grabs the reader)

hum, portals are meant to redirect members to sub-pages... if you have a portal with too much information, people do not visit anymore... the portal is for newcombers, not regular members who already bookmarked their prefered part of the site...

having a portal with a high % would be good for information portals, not communities.

How do I figure out my bounce rate?

I tried working with the google analytics once but didn't seem to get it put into my templates correctly.

Are there directions to get set up and gather better statistics?

Right now I only have the basic statistics created by webalizer from my apache logs.

-Raymond

All you do to add google analytics is put it at the very bottom of your footer template. That should work.

For my homepage: 22%
Site: http://thebestforumever.com

Domain since feb 2007
Who goes the the front of a website when you have search ?

Sep 1 - Sep 30

http://www.szone.us

92.29% New Visits

6.58% Direct Traffic
10.60% Referring Sites
82.77% Search Engines

82.48% Overall Bounce
65.92% Main index (portal) Bounce
16.67% Forum index Bounce

2,020 pagess were viewed a total of 25,169 times

1. /forums/ | 12,427 page views | 87.47% Bounce
2. /gallery/ | 10,323 page views | 58.92% Bounce
3. /forums/index.php | 170 page views | 16.67% Bounce
4. / | 539 page views | 65.92%% Bounce

absolutely correct - I'm with you here.

But, the problem is not "too much information". The problem is too much junk information.

A lot of admins forget that the "portal" (main index page) is not about them...
the portal should be about converting new visitors and redirecting repeat readers. I say this because a lot of vbulletin sites (with portals) have a lot of "junk" blocks on the main page - which are always ignored. I guess some admins think it's cool. (IMO, they use it as a filler - and, it just hurts conversion)

Bookmarking inner pages wouldn't affect bounce rate on portal.

Anyway...

Are you assuming all members bookmark a specific section of a site?

What's wrong with bookmarking the main index page? That's what most people do. My bookmark to this place is http://vbulletin.org - what do you say about that?

Unless your site is about 'WEB Development', it's safer to assume that a visitor DOES NOT understand how to bookmark OR what it is.

arrgghh, I can't believe that came out of you

there's nothing good about a high bounce rate

A portal should be utilized to:

• stand out (in our case, from millions of other forums);
• grab attention;
• provide a snapshot of what's going on;
• cause action;
• and redirect to inner pages.

(I'm sure we can add a lot more to the above list. For now, that will do.)

A portal with no ads should have single digit bounce rate.
If portal contains ads, bounce rate should not exceed 10-20% (safe number).

If portal bounce rate is high - you should seriously consider a major overhaul.



NOTE
The term "portal" is used loosely to represent the main index page (root) of a site. In terms of a vbulletin site, this would include a page other than forum index.

Site launched Aug 4,2008 - still in dev (need a new image scroller/rotater and rss feeds re-done)
Domain since 2001

Sep 1 - Sep 30

http://www.chatsworthchamber.com

82.36% New Visits

24.47% Direct Traffic
13.66% Referring Sites
61.87% Search Engines

54.37% Overall Bounce
36.09% Main index (portal) Bounce
16.67% Forum index Bounce

550 pages were viewed a total of 8,632 times

1. / | 1,382 page views | 36.09% Bounce
2. /gallery/ | 1,336 page views | 45.61% Bounce
12. /forum.php | 107 page views| 16.67 Bounce

I did not say " it have to be that way "... i say it is what we regularly see... from experience, i see a lot of sites like cnn.com or espn.com having a ton of bounce because their home page is rotating a load of content, you do not even have to visit internally... and they have a lot of external links on their sites so you bounce just by checking the content...

i'm with you about the over-usage of the portals on vb sites... because the script have blocks doesn't mean you have to activate them.

during these economic woes, it's important to fix high Bounce Rate...

for some, traffic will increase in their 'field of interest' - these are the people who have the most to gain (or lose)

to ensure that you are not on the losing end, your main page should have a low bounce rate

if your main page has a high bounce rate - it's time to make some changes

What causes high Bounce Rate?

• content (quatity, quality, formatting, placement, etc)
• bad interface/layout (choice of style)
• bad choice of color (choice of style)
• linking to external sites
• ads (ie. Adsense)
• marketing (false or misleading advertising)*

When linking to external sites or using ads one should consider at least a 5%-10% increase in bounce rate.

With that said, main page bounce rate should be in the single digits (no ads/external links).

* false or misleading advertising will cost you money and will increase bounce rate ... I see this a lot with people using Adwords - their ad variations are not specify and lean towards misleading

My bounce rate is:

Site 9.63%
Main page 7.98%
Forum index 13.63%

Can someone explain where to find this at? I have Godaddy hosting if that helps >_<

nice info

I have Google Analytics installed on my site, so I got my info from there.

Frontpage: 16,26%
Forum: 19,01%
Some directory with exclusive information: 74,36%

Also funny: /forum/register.php 0,00%
Not that many people click that link the last couple of weeks :erm:

21.1 % over 12 months, according to Google Analytics. Yay!

30 day average

34.79% Bounce Rate
1,896,518 pageviews
166,437 Visits
00:13:42 Avg. Time on Site


Now the interesting part:

Portal site that helps funnel traffic to the forums - 8.31% bounce rate
MSN bounce rate - 12.67%
Youtube bounce rate - 23.99%
Yahoo bounce rate - 36.52%
Google bounce rate - 52.61%
AOL bounce rate - 55.77% <--- but who really cares about AOL?

1.71% - Bounce Rate
87,351 - Visits
918,315 - Pageviews
10.51 - Pages/Visit
00:05:18 - Avg. Time on Site
61.58 % - New Visits

30 Day Span

I have only just begun collecting my google analytics statistics. It took a little while for me to get going. For anyone else who has not started yet or is a little confused I created a quick tutorial called how to add google analytics to your vBulletin forum. I have two forums that are my biggest concern at the moment. DiscussNY.com has a 66.09% bounce rate, and E-Mail Questions has a 63.46% bounce rate. any thought on either forum would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

-Raymond

Here are some ways to effectively lower your bounce rate. Lots of things go into why visitors come to your site and leave immediately most common are probably poor layout/navigation, combined with lack of content or the site is just hard to use.

Installed analytics a couple of days ago. The board section of customerssuck.com is getting a bounce rate of 18% or so at the moment, though I'd like to have more data before getting a steady picture.

Rapscallion

I disagree that a high bounce rate is "danger will robinson"....

The nature of your traffic is a big factor. If your forum gets millions of referrals per month from search engine traffic, then you will have a very high bounce rate.

Forums with little search referral traffic (or little traffic in general) will have lower bounce rates.

So, to make a general statement without any context that a high bounce rate is "bad" is wrong, very wrong.

My bounce rate is:

Thursday, March 26, 2009 - 62.50%

Quite the opposite. If people are coming to your site from SE then your bounce rate should be lower as they should be there looking for things related to whatever they searched for.

A high bounce rate is bad. Its simple as that. Bounce rate can be affected by your content, design, navigation and external links on a site to just name a few.

The lower the bounce rate, the better no matter what.


Bounce Rate - 22.94% for forum in signature
SE Bounce Rate (approx 38% of traffic) is at 18.33%

a high bounce rate is BAD regardless of where your traffic is coming from

when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong
- if your index bounce rate is high something is wrong

a lot of secondary pages (ie. page 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) can have a negative affect on bounce rate (comments usually don't offer any "good" content - not much can be done about this)

62.50% is bad or good?

I'm currently on 15% on my main forum, which I consider quite acceptable.

Rapscallion

i'm at about 8%

So true. If there is one thing I can give this site credit for is that they do try to eliminate unneeded crap and limited it to this forum. I just had a meeting with my mods about this last night. The steering is exhausting though.

4-Mar-09 / 3-Apr-09
==================
Overall site bounce rate
65.38%

Main page bounce rate
19.14%

Forum index page bounce rate:
55.29%

URL: http://www.szone.us/

I changed the front page / portal to a listing of many subjects vs. 4 main news posts.

Old stats before change:

82.48% Overall Bounce
65.92% Main index (portal) Bounce
16.67% Forum index Bounce

wow! some EXCELLENT improvements :up: :up:

TIPS:
- increase font size just a little bit (portal and navbar links)
- enlarge google search input field and button (increased queries = more revenue)
- tone down the white background (on some monitors the color can be too bright for sensitive eyes - know your target audience)

this isn't a style review so I will stop there
but, I do see other problems with the style

Will do, ya I have a some errors still. -- 38 Errors, 1 warning(s)
I'll get back to fixing html problems in a bit. It was 270 and 30 :D

check the pic :p

No. it is not. I have been over this with many sites.

Most sites that receive traffic mostly from search engine referrals (the long tail traffic) will see very high bounce rates.

This is because most users who search for content using a search engine will click on the site from, say Google, and then they will "go back" if they do not find what they need and select another site (from the search engine). This is the nature of "long tail" traffic.

Almost all sites with high volumes of traffic from search engines referrals have high bounce rates.

So, when you say (incorrectly) "all high bounce rates are bad" what you are saying is "all long-tail search engine referral traffic is bad" because you cannot high search engine traffic without having a high bounce rate.

This is a fact. I wish it was not a fact, but it is.

Forums with 95% of their traffic, which are millions of page views a month, will have high bounce rates. Sites with mostly direct traffic and referral traffic other that search engines, will have a lower bounce rate.

Folks who make blanket statements that "high bounce rate is bad" normally come from sites that have low page views and little traffic from search engine referrals. The proof is in the numbers of high volume sites with mega long-tail search referrals.

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It depends on the nature and volume of your traffic.

See my earlier posts.

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Then you, more than likely, have site with relatively low page views per month from direct or non-search engine referral traffic

urgghhh, that's why I said "when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong"

I guess I should have wrote a long message to make things more clearer for those who couldn't grasp the message.

I totally agree with the "long tail" traffic - this is one of the reasons why you need to start looking at individual pages (files - ie. index, showthread, forumdisplay, etc).

Large sites* with 80% traffic coming from search engines should see a "global" bounce rate of 50-65% -- anything higher than this will need tweeking. (Yes, it can be improved.)

(large sites* - 5 million+ page views per month)