How 30 seconds dropped my bounce rate by 78%
General By Dave Ward. Posted April 23, 2010Blogging about blogging alert!
This post is a bit off-topic, but I thought it was interesting. Since many of you have asked me metablogging questions, I thought you might be interested too.
An overwhelming majority of people who end up on my site only view a single page per visit. In fact, you’ll probably do the same. As I’ve come to realize: that’s okay.
I didn’t always think it was okay though. Throughout most of 2007, that caused me a great deal of concern. I’d been reading too many blogs about blogging, was convinced that persuading you to click through multiple pages was essential to the site’s success, but wasn’t able to make that happen here
Ultimately, the number of pageviews wasn’t very worrisome, because the site continued to grow. What did frustrate me was the impact that single-view visits have on a more important metric.
My site, the trampoline
What really does make single-view visits irritating is their impact on how bounce rates are calculated. Bounce rates are a measure of how many visitors hit your site and immediately leave; a bad thing. Almost every stats package, whether server-side (e.g. AWStats) or JavaScript-driven (e.g. Google Analytics), counts a visit with only one pageview as a bounce.
For example, if you spend five minutes reading this single post and then leave the site, Google Analytics will report your visit the same as if you left instantly. It will imply that you immediately left the site, even if you read every sentence. Without a second request to calculate how long you actually spent on the page, the worst is assumed.
Who cares?
The fundamental problem is that the difference between those interpretations is profound; especially for traffic coming from search engines. Worrying about bounce rates could easily be dismissed as pointless obsessing, but I think it’s one of my most important stats.
If someone finds the site during a search and gets everything they need from a single post and its comments, I see that as a win. However, if they read for a few seconds and decide my post was a bad result for their search, something needs fixing.
Lacking an accurate metric, I’ve always hoped that the former scenario was the prevalent one. I do try to write comprehensive posts and have been fortunate to have comments that are often better than the posts themselves, so that wasn’t completely far-fetched.
It was hard not to worry about the other scenario though.
If it’s good enough for Hanselman…
Luckily, I happened to read this post by Scott Hanselman, and realized that I’d been focusing on the wrong things. The entire post is great, but this was specifically relevant to my worries:
Given that realization, I look at my stats maybe twice a month, and I’m most interested in seeing what posts folks really liked that month. I used to (maybe 3 years ago) look at every referrer and stats daily, but then I realized that my personal litmus test for my blog’s success or failure is comments and other folks’ blog posts, and nothing else.
While that was good advice by itself, the most important bit of information (to me) was that he had also revealed his site’s bounce rate: 77.71%.
At that point, I immediately stopped worrying about my bounce rate. If 77.71% was good enough for Hanselman, my 78.41% was clearly not something to fixate on.
The amazing difference 30 seconds can make
Having put those insecurities behind me a couple years ago, I was interested to recently learn that my stats provider, Clicky, was about to improve how they measure bounces. Rather than rely solely on a second pageview to calculate bounce rates, Clicky’s client-side tracking code now “pings” back periodically to confirm that you’re still viewing the page.
At a 30 second interval between pings, the resolution is still imperfect, but I’m finally able to gain a better understanding of how many single pageview visits actually are bounces. As it turns out, after a week of the new tracking method, not many:
What a difference 30 seconds makes!
Now I know that most of those single pageview visits actually did represent the best-case scenario. It’s not that the content was bounce-inducingly irrelevant/bad, but relevant/good enough that a second pageview often wasn’t necessary.
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What do you think?
I appreciate all of your comments, but please try to stay on topic. If you have a question unrelated to this post, I recommend posting on the ASP.NET forums or Stack Overflow instead.
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I like the way you see the efficiency of presenting the information people want first hand. And it’s also interesting the way you used to measure it. I agree that it reflects a lot more the real situation that you have. Thanks for sharing!
Interesting, another area that might be causing you to feel less successful than you are it feed readers. I found your site last year. I have been back a few times, but I tend to read all your post in my reader; this one included. I only came to the site this time to post a comment. I see you are using feadburner, which helps. Rest assured, your content rocks and one page view or 100 it has helped me, and I am sure many others.
EXACTLY! I just read this entry in fact in Google Reader, not directly from your site. How does feedburner help? Is there any way to know someone’s looking at your page through Google Reader?
Also, for those of us who keep up with your blog, rarely will you see someone like me go to a second page, because I’m just here to read your latest post — I’ve already read your other posts. Another subtlety bounce rates don’t take into account, although this article definitely helps address that.
It’s tough to measure RSS engagement. FeedBurner tries, but it’s definitely one of the least accurate metrics (and , probably the most important to me).
Thanks for taking the time to click through from the feed and leave a comment. That extra friction RSS readers add to joining the comments is the only thing I dislike about RSS.
Thanks for taking the time to click through and comment. I know exactly what you mean; I read most of my favorite sites primarily in an RSS reader too. I think that’s great too. I’d never trade that for pageviews.
Out of curiosity, what would you think about the feed containing a “similar posts” section or Twitter/comment links at the end of the feed? Would that be something you might use if it were there, or would it just be annoying?
I doubt I would use them, but I wouldn’t find them annoying either. I tend to use the share features in Google Reader. So if I wanted to tweet your post, I would do it that way. Just my preference, tend to be a creature of habit.
What about some JS that runs when the user closes the page? The Onleave or OnClose or whatever that event is called.
I believe the issue there is that you can’t guarantee it will run, unless you do something like a confirm() to block the browser. Maybe if one of the Clicky guys reads this, they can comment more accurately on that.
Yup, no way to guarantee it will run, or even if it does, that it would have time to talk to our tracking servers before the window closes. This seems like the ideal solution because then you know *exactly* how long they were on your page, but there’s no an elegant way to do it.
It’s a better metric, but still not ideal, and I wonder what the longest recorded time on a page is. Personally, I opened this page from a twitter by a friend quite a few hours ago (along with about 5 other pages), then after 3-4 hours reading in the sun came back to look at it.
I believe it continues pinging for up to 20 minutes (40 pings) after a page load.
edit: Looking closer, it appears to only ping for 10 minutes.
Yeah it’s not perfect, but most people agree it’s definitely *better*, because there are a lot of one page visits that actually engage the visitor. Particularly on content oriented sites such as blogs.
We want to make the pinging a bit smarter in the future, perhaps only pinging if the page/tab is focused and the visitor is using the page. So opening a bunch of links from Twitter where they all end up in the background, those wouldn’t ping because the visitor isn’t actually reading them. This is all speculation of course, but we want to make it as good as it can be.
Great post! I was extremely happy when Clicky switched over to the pinging method of tracking site usage. My bounce rate dropped about 55% and I see that people are truly spending time on my posts.
Thanks!
Very interesting stuff! I may have to look into clicky a bit myself because I have been having similar concerns. My bounce rate is frighteningly high though I have no real way to measure how many of these are genuine bounces.
Thanks for the heads-up, this is great!
It really depends on your definition of ‘bounce’. Surely if its good content, then the reader will want to investigate your site further – therefore not leaving and causing the traditional ‘bounce’?
That’s more often the case with visitors from email referrals, Twitter, and general searches for terms like “Encosia” or “Dave Ward.”
However, about 70% of my traffic comes from people trying to find an answer so they can do their job (e.g. specific task-related searches or links from help sites like Stack Overflow). No matter how good the content is, they’re probably going to read it and then get back to work. Nothing wrong with that. If I’m able to help them do that with a single pageview, I see that as a much better case than requiring that they view several pages to get what they need.
I think you’re right though that the definition of “bounce” is important. To me, it’s ultimately a measure of engagement. For my site, calculating it solely by sequences of pageviews turns out to be fairly inaccurate. Of course, maybe for an e-commerce landing page, getting that second pageview is the most important engagement metric.
see http://www.pagealizer.com they also have an accurate bounce rate tracking tool.
Excellent post. I did not realize bounce rate measured folks who visited only one page. Now I dont feel so bad about my high bounce rate either. But like you, I am curious about what percentage is the bad stuff. Does google analytics capture some time-specific bounce rate info?
I would enjoy the related posts at the bottom. And I’m only brining it up because you referenced him in this specific post, but Hanselman does it too ;)
Any chance that Google Analytics will start using a pinging method?
For Google Analytics you can track JavaScript events as a pageview, so there are many ways you could determine if a user is really engaging with your content (onScroll, onFocus, etc.). You could also use a timed event onLoad if you wanted to base your bounce rate on the number of seconds a user was on your page. You would then have to compare your base pageviews with the ones that were triggered with your event to determine your true bounce rate. I haven’t used other analytics programs as much, but I am sure you could come up with something similar.
Example for 10 seconds:
Nice post. I would have thought you could derive a similar conclusion from the average time spent on site statistic in Analytics.
Thanks fir the heads up regarding Clicky, sounds as though it is worth a look.
Definitely do check it out. I’ve been using Clicky for quite awhile now and have been really happy with it.
Unfortunately I tend to go to places like dzone and open tabs to potentially hundreds of sites and during my spare time slowly begin reading through them – some I never read, some I scan over and close before reading properly but using the method I described I’d be included in the 30 second group even though I’d not actually viewed the page;
An interesting addition to what you mentioned would be a 30 second delay that occurs after the tab is viewed; I’m not sure on the JS used for this but lots of video sites (I think even YouTube does it now) so it’s certainly possible
Your post was quite good. I’m not sure if I’ve ever visited before, but it dropped on my radar of rss-feeds. :) Some feed items I do open, others I just read from the reader. This revelation you had made me browse further on the site to see what else is here. :) From the comments I saw that the window.close might not always trigger an event, which means that I do have to check some code tomorrow at the office. :/
Very good point about bounce rate and the content aggregators. Seen spikes on my bounce rate before and wondered why
Well, if it weren’t because of this comment I bet my visit would appear as a bounce (despite the fact I have just read the whole post and found it very interesting).
Some people use javascript whitelists such as Firefox NoScript plugins, I am not sure how that ping would work here.
Greetings!
Thanks for pointing to clicky, it seems great, and especially if their bouncing rateas are more accurate than GA – Thanks
This is a great post. I feel better already!
As several of the first comments mentioned, a lot of people read my blog through a reader too. When I truncated my posts, my visits spiked but my subscriber rate went down. When I went back to full feed (which I think is better) my visits went down but my subscriber rate went up.
The bounce rate thing is just annoying. So is the “unique visitor” metric. Some of my readers don’t spend a lot of time- because they’re fans- they’ve read everything I’ve written. I think you have to decide what is most important for your site. Each blog has different goals and therefore different metrics it should be focusing on. Right now I’m deciding what makes the most sense for my blog.
I guess you have the problem solved by now but I too was concerned about this metric and concluded that a good way to measure it was to track how far down the page the user scrolled a record a custom event when a threshold was met.
I have written an article about this if you are interested Tracking scroll depth to reveal content engagement in Google Analytics
I found this post to be very interesting.
I am always trying to learn more about things that impact bounce rates.
Thanks! Great article. I always wondered how bounce rate metric system works and how it affects a websites stats and analysis.
the low bounce rate reporting from getclicky is still just massaging your ego though, even if a user sticks around 3m and only views one page, it’s still bad IMO as they could be inactive visits and may not have read anything at all and simply had another window open which they diverted their attention to.
Furthermore, have a reported 75% bounce rate by analytics and then moving to getclicky and getting a reprted 15% bounce rate does nothing, because the facts haven’t changed, you’ve got the same/similar volume of traffic, and your visitors are all behaving similarly as well.
Unless you’re selling your website to an investor, and you want to wow them with amazing retention rates of your visitors, it means nothing.
You’re misunderstanding the primary use-case of this site.
My goal isn’t to force users to jump through several hoops to find what they’re after. It’s to answer their question on a single page if possible. Improving a traditional bounce rate would likely mean that I’m failing at that goal.
The Clicky data isn’t absolutely accurate, sure, but it’s much better for my site than Google Analytics.
Dave, thank you for this post. My first time visiting your blog and I too will probably register as a Bounce… therefore it was a successful post!
Question: when GA registers a single page visit as a bounce does it also show it as 00:00:00 time spent on site?
That’s correct, bounce visits count as 0 time on site, regardless of how long the visitor may have actually spent on the single page.
This is very encouraging! I just started blogging in September and was a little discouraged as well as confused by these zero time hits. Thanks again. :-)
I’ve got a fairly high bounce rate on a couple of my sites – sometimes it can be an indication of a good result, or sometimes I’m pushing to promote an action (like generate a lead) but other times I find it very difficult to identify the reason for a high bounce rate.
this is super helpful. right now our bounce rate is really misleading because its a 1 page flash site i think but when we redo it with seperate pages this info will come in handy