After having written this as a tweet recently:
I need to write a long rant-like post on the emphasis Google has on Bounce rates when a high rate can (sometimes) be a measure of success…
See the Twitter post via @nzbase here.
I felt obliged to go ahead and describe exactly why I believe Google has issues with the way it uses Bounce rates as a measure of success in helping to rank pages in their search.
Here is an excerpt from a recent post in the Google Webmaster Central Blog from Susan Moskwa a Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google.
…If I don’t track my PageRank, what should I be tracking?
#2 Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit…Source: Google Webmaster Central blog post.
#1 was Conversion rate and #3 was Clickthrough rate (CTR).
The real problem I have with the Bounce rate (and this closely ties in with the Conversion rate too) is that these are very strongly weighted to e-commerce or business websites i.e. websites that have shopping carts, purchases or at least are looking for leads.
Where these metrics fall over is when the website in question is not looking for a sale, lead or other call to action but is instead interested in either providing the searcher with a relevant answer to their search or is just interested in providing someone with the right information when they need it.
In an e-commerce situation, if the searcher comes to a page and then leaves the website again from that page, it’s generally considered a failure in the websites’ ability to interact with the searcher and have them move onto the next page on their site however this is just not neccesarily the case for every website and definitely is not the case for most content, blog or brochure websites.
In the case where a page has excellent usability, answers the searchers question in a few seconds and then the user leaves the website to go and do something else (therefore creating a high Bounce rate that Google says is bad) then that website is going to be majorly disadvantaged by their quality of usability.
If instead the searcher has to look around on that page for the answer, didn’t find it, clicks on to another page and then another and then eventually finds the answer. That website would have a lack of usability, a lower level of satisfaction for the searcher however they would have a lower Bounce rate and therefore according to this metric that Google has suggested is highly relevant, they would be promoted as a good website and return higher on the Google SERPS.
Should a website reduce its usability to gain better Bounce rate metrics for Google?
Some people here would jump in and say that even if the searcher ends up on only a single page then hopefully Google is taking something like time on the page as an indicator for that page being the source of the content that the searcher was really looking for. I would suggest that the better the usability on the page, the quicker the searcher will find the answer they’re looking for and therefore there’s a potential for time on page to be a negative indicator as well.
Let me know your thoughts on this situation in the comments, do you agree or disagree?
