Page views and bounce rates
Strategic perspective
Marketing and sales perspective
Key performance question this indicator helps to answer
How effective is our internet strategy?
Why is this indicator important?
Page views and bounce rates are two of a number of metrics that are used in website traffic analytics for assessing the effectiveness of the pages of an organisation’s website in attracting visitors and retaining them for the period of time required for them to meet the goals of the site owner – be that sales or information delivery, for example.
Page views is simply the total number of pages viewed on the site and so is a general measure of how extensively the site is used.
Average page views is one way of measuring visit quality. A high average number of page views suggests that visitors interact extensively with the website. A high average number of page views results from one or both of:
- appropriately targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who are interested in what the site offers);
- high-quality content presented effectively on the site.
Conversely, low average page views indicates that the traffic coming to the site has not been appropriately targeted to what the site offers or that the site does not deliver what was promised to the visitor.
Such information provides powerful insights into whether or not the site pages need to be redesigned or whether the marketing to potential visitors needs to be more targeted. Naturally, for organisations that promote content (such as news) a high average page view provides valuable data with which to sell page space to potential advertisers, for example, as it helps them determine expected revenues from their advertisements.
For the owner of the site this information can be useful to see if any change in the ‘page’ (such as the information or the way it is presented) results in more visits.
Bounce rates essentially represent the percentage of initial visitors to a site who ‘bounce’ away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. A visitor can bounce by: clicking on a link to a page on a different website, closing an open window or tab, typing a new URL, clicking the ‘Back’ button to leave the site or session timeout.
Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page (such as a home page). An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website. Bounce rate can be seen as a measure of visit quality in that a high bounce rate generally means that the site entrance page isn’t relevant to the site visitors (but this isn’t always the case – see Tips/warnings on page 158).
How do I measure it?
Data collection method
Analytics tracking software is used to collect the data.
Formula
Frequency
Measured on an ongoing basis, given the medium being analysed, and may be reported as frequently as required by the site owner.
Source of the data
Web analytics software.
Cost/effort in collecting the data
The page views and bounce rate can be collected for free using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
Target setting/benchmarks
Numerous industry and sector benchmark reports for website traffic analytics exist, and can be generally found through web searches or through industry consortiums. Consider the following, which is a benchmark industry report for US retail by Core Metrics and includes page views per session:
Source: www.coremetrics.com
Regarding bounce rates, Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated: ‘My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.’
Consider this analysis of bounce rate by industry:
- Retail sites (driving well-targeted traffic) 20–40% bounce
- Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as ‘add to cart’) 70–90% bounce
- Portals (such as Yahoo!, MSN) 10–30% bounce
- Service sites (self-service and FAQ sites) 10–30% bounce
- Content website (with high search visibility) 40–60% bounce
- Lead generation (services for sales) 30–50% bounce
Example
Yahoo! Inc. receives many millions of hits to its home page each hour. To test new assumptions (in this case that making a certain alteration to the home page will change behaviours of visitors) it randomly assigns one or two hundred thousand users to an experimental group and has several million other visitors as a control group. By doing so, it can quickly see whether or not the alterations to the home page lead to the assumed change in the behaviour of the customer (such as clicking through to other pages and so reducing bounce rates). This in turn allows Yahoo! to optimise its offerings to enhance revenues and profits. The results of these experiments can often be seen within minutes, and Yahoo! typically runs about 20 experiments at any given time. This way, the results of the analysis drive behaviours, cutting out lengthy discussions about website design best practices – which of course can be extremely subjective and biased (quote from The Intelligent Company: Five Steps to Succeeding with Evidence-based Management by Bernard Marr).
Tips/warnings
There are many ways to increase page views, such as natural link building, which is an important search engine optimisation technique that works most effectively when a highly trafficked site provides an outbound link to another website. The more quality links a website has, the better the chance it has of ranking well in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
Tips to decrease bounce rates: provide relevant content, build a clear navigation path/menu, place search function prominently, get rid of pop-up ads, reduce external links (or have them open in a new window), improve the load-time of pages (the longer the load-time, the greater the bounce rate).
Keep in mind that the bounce rate measure needs to be interpreted relative to a website’s objective. On an e-commerce site, where the sole aim may be to sell products online, the bounce rate is a primary concern and useful measurement. Information sources and sites which drive the customer to make contact via e-mail or phone may see much higher bounce rates. This may not be a bad thing as they are viewing only one page of the site (but contacting the company). Such companies are interested in page views and not bounce rate – an 80% bounce as rate might be perfectly acceptable.
References
Bounce Rate Demystified: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/?wide=1
www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60127