Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Reducing Bounce Rate - Soft vs Hard Bounces


In the last few days I found a lot of interesting articles about how to reduce the bounce rate. I found very helpfull the below articles:
http://www.inc.com/guides/2011/01/how-to-reduce-your-website-bounce-rate.html
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/07/7-ways-to-lower-your-home-page-bounce-rate.htm

But there is one more thing missing there. I was reviewwing analytics of a site that has brave ammounts of incoming traffic and found out that some pages are both "Top Landing Pages" and "Top Exit Pages" at the same time. Also another thing that I found interesting is that those pages contained articles about specific topics that were covering the keywords on search engines. This for me creates iself a statement. The visitor came in. Read a nice written article that covered a part of the information the visitor wanted to see. And left site without doing any other action. So is this a Bounce? What if the visitor spent a good amount of time reading? The hard definition of Bounce Rate says this is still a bounce. But for me in order to make some bussiness statements, if the page provided good information or not, it is not a bounce.
Because as an article did it job! It was read. I do not care if the visitor closed it to read one of his other tabs.
What I am saying is that there should be a way to seperate soft bounces from hard bounces, and in the example I just described this should be a soft bounce and of course not a failure of serving information.
Until google and any other analytics platforms give us the ability to seperate these two types of bouncing you can do the following:
Create a seperate account for this site so you can track visits in both accounts
For the second account after adding the code that does the pagetrack add an event track that is going to be executed after a time interval. So you ensure that the visitor stays some time into your page. Look at the end of this post for code
Finally you can see reports from both analytics profiles and compare the Bounce Rates!

Thanks for reading.

Here is your code that does not bounce a visit which lasted more than a minute:

<script type="text/javascript">

	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-DUMMY");

	pageTracker._initData();

	pageTracker._trackPageview();

	setTimeout('pageTracker._trackEvent(\'NoBounce\', \'NoBounce\', \'Over 60 seconds\')',60000);

</script>



2 comments:

  1. This is one of the beneficial post.I like your blog attribute.Nice post.
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  2. If Website having proper navigation and the web page does not having any broken links and 404 errors,it should have the low amount of bounce rate value.
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