Bounce Traffic Is Not Necessarily a Bad Thing

Bounce rate has historically been considered a black eye in Google Analytics but only if it’s viewed from the context of homepage traffic.  For example, if you have a blog and someone finds it in all likelihood the person will read the blog then leave the website even if they spent 10 minutes reading that blog post.  In this scenario, Google Analytics would say it’s a “bounce” because the person didn’t go to a second page on the website.  In conjunction with the “session time,” it would show a big fat 0 in seconds.  This is because sessions only count seconds IF there is a second click.  So, bounce rate isn’t the best indicator if you have paid traffic going to a specifically targeted page of interest.

What Do You Do For Better Metrics?

Great question, well, as a digital marketer there is already baked in data in analytics that provides Time on Page or Avg Time on Page which will give you a better indicator of how long a person spent reading your blog or targeted paid traffic to say a vehicle detail page on a car dealer website.

The second thing I would recommend is to build some triggers in Google Tag Manager that will create custom events back in analytics tied to things like scroll percentage (how far down on the page did a person go – 25%, 50%, etc).  The second thing I’d recommend is setting up event tracking on all elements (scrolling, clicking, etc).  This will show you how engaged that user was on the website.

Bottom line, don’t just take the bounce rate as an indicator IF you are driving people to a specific page on your site that is very focused because odds are the landed there for a reason and once they got the info they needed the bounce …which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.