You may find that a high bounce rate on your website is no problem at all. Bounce rate measures how many people come to your website and then immediately leave. Jakob Nielsen, noted usability expert, has written about using bounce rate as a metric for measuring usability improvements in his June 30th, 2008 Alertbox column.
He first writes that unique visitors should not be used as a metric for measuring usability improvements on a website because it doesn’t matter how many people look at your content. Rather, you ought to be concerned with how many people look at your content and decide that it isn’t worth their time. Neilsen would have us believe that we must strive for a low bounce rate. His argument is actually a bit more nuanced and has some good points, but that is the gist of it.
However, bounce rate is not necessarily a sign of an unusable website. It may indicate that your site is working really well. Say, for example, you sell a very expensive service through your website. It could be the case that website is doing a good job of qualifying your sales leads - people are getting a good idea whether they even want to bother calling you. This is a good thing, because you don’t want just anybody calling up your sales team. You want people with the best chance of buying.
A far better way to measure the success of your usability efforts is to measure how many people are doing the thing or things that you want them to do on your website. If you’ve got a form on your website where people request a quote, you can measure how changes to your website affect how many people fill out that form. If you’ve got a phone number on your site, you can measure the change in call volume. If you’ve got a site that sells widgets directly to consumers, you can measure the change in sales.
Measuring bounce rate makes sense if your site just exists to provide information and nothing else. Otherwise, you measure success on how many people do what you want them to do. Of course, the point of usability was to try to make it easier for your customers to do the thing you want them to do.
2 Comments
It could also mean that each page is microtargeted. That’s the case with many blogs.
I like the way you swung back around to conversion as a usability metric. I think Nielsen assumes that many sites are out there to create engagement, in which case, bounce rate suggests lack of engagement. Although, truth be told, time on site is likely a better measure.
Conversion can take many touches, particularly for high involvement products. In this case, one measure of conversion might be whether the person returned.
I agree with this. My bounce rate was a bit high, but then I realized that people might be clicking directly on my affiliate links, which is one of the goals of my website.
People search for a product, end up somewhere deep within http://whybuymadeinusa.com/ and then click on the link to buy from Amazon. I don’t have a problem, if that is what is really happening. I’ll have to take a close look at my stats.
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