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.