Hey Dustin!

Thanks for the episode. Always gets me thinking. The main three practices that lower bounce rates on my sites are:
1. Having a good looking site (if you’ve got just a basic twentytwelve theme, for example, people might not take your site seriously). I’ve seen my bounce rate drop to 25% from 85% just from changing the default, or installing a free WooTheme. Makes a difference.
2. Adding a big picture or a YouTube video. If people watch a YouTube video or have to scroll past a picture (or if the picture is intriguing), it’ll add to the time-on-page stat, which helps to decrease your chances of a bounce.
3. Umm… have what people are looking for (duh!). Seriously, if you don’t have the product, service or content that people are looking for, they are out of there. How many times have I walked into a bakery looking for bread, only to see cake, and I walk right back out. You don’t have what I want, I’m on to the next place.

Don’t know if you (and everyone) are aware, but Google released their Analytics Academy a few months ago. It’s SUPER helpful if you want to dip your toes into the deep waters of GA: https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course . 

Off topic, but while I’m on here, do you know of a good resource for using BackWPup files to either migrate a site or restore from a crash? I can’t find anything good. 

Maybe I’m bouncing too soon from all the right sites though;-). 

Be well!

Hey Dustin.

Great episode. Really good topic to start the year.

The ONLY thing that Google Analytics counts as a Bounce is if a unique visitor comes to your site, and doesn’t look at another page. The 30 Minute Rule doesn’t count.

So as you said, they could watch your content and just leave, read a post and leave, get your number and call and make a $10,000 sale and leave. Or they could just go back to Google and try someone else’s website. All count as Bounces.

A little tip – in Google Analytics you can actually leave yourself notes on the timeline. Great for when you make changes. Just make an annotation under the graph, then you can review later without having to chase up bits of paper.

Bounce rate is all relative – one page to the next, one month to the next. In the olde days we used to be able to compare with what Keywords they used to search – but that (mainly) only works with Google AdWords searches now. You can also compare bounces for different traffic sources. PPC vs Organic vs Referrals vs Emails vs Facebook etc.

Also – check bounce rate and time on site for Desktop vs Mobile (and iPhone vs iPad). Quick way to tell how your site fares in your visitors eyes on various platforms.

Cheers.

Thanks Dustin…I have wondered about bounce rate.  Our site,
http://www.dadsdisappearingsalsa.com has been up now for about 5 months.  Our
bounce rate is right around 55% right now.  We do want that to be lower. 
One thing we have focused on is load speed.  You recommended looking
into managed wordpress hosting verses a basic shared hosting service. 
We have just made the switch over to Flywheel.  Our speed according to
Pingdom went from 85% slower than all websites tested to 40-50% faster
than all websites tested.  They handle caching, backups, security and
they are very easy to work with.  Love it so far.  I am hoping we can
continue to get our speed up, but believe that will help bounce rate on
the front end as people don’t want to wait on a slow site and will
bounce immediately if they have to wait too long.  Thanks for the
recommendation.