Building traffic to your website isn’t easy.  The first thing you need to do is create great content that attracts visitors and keeps them around.   How do you know if you have truly great content?  You need  to take a look at metrics from web analytics packages like Google Analytics and measure what is working and what is not working. You need to figure out what is going wrong and fix it.  The most disturbing metric for many  websites is the bounce rate.   According to Google, if you have a 70% bounce rate that means 7 out of 10 visitors are saying (and I’m quoting) ”I came, I puked, I left!”

Below, you will find an informative video from Avinash Kaushik of Google talking about bounce rate.  The video is from 2007 but Google does not say much about bounce rate so you have to take what you can get.

Below you can find some of the highlights from the video.

• bounce rate is powerful
• bounce rate is brilliantly dumb
• a bounce indicates the customer experience is – I came, I puked I left
• marketer spend tons of moeny on direct marketing,  adwords, affiliate marketing
• metrics helps you understand where are you are acquiring crappy traffic from
• marketers wonder why conversion rate is 1% – it is because of bounce rate
• ecommerce – conversion rate is probably 2% average. doesn’t matter if you are selling elephants or ipods
• if you are really good at direct marketing – your conversion rate is probably 30-35%
• conversion rate is 2% because of high bounce rate
• most traffic comes and leaves instantly
• few people actually know the bounce rate of their website
• average bounce rate 40-60%
• 31% is a GREAT bounce rate
• bounce rate is a great qualifying metric and helps you ask the right questions
• you can look at bounce rate by referring sites
• you can look at bounce rate by keyword
• you can look at bounce rate by landing page
• you can not convince all of the traffic on your website to stay
• you should look at the  top 20-30 entry pages
• bounce rate won’t give you all of the answers but will help you quickly distill down where things are not going right

So why does a video production company like Rewatchable care about bounce rate?  Well, if most of your “visitors leave instantly” we think it is because they have not been convinced to stay.  You need to give every visitor compelling content to choose from.  If a visitor has the opportunity to click on a great short video you have an opportunity to hook them and help them understand why your product or service is worth a closer look.

Rewatchable is Massachusetts Video Production Company