Do you know what the most crucial element of your landing page is? It’s not oprah images (although these help…J/K) or the CBS and Fox images or even the bajillion testimonials you have littered throughout it. The single most crucial element is getting people to believe and clicking over to convert on your offer. We are NOT actually talking about conversions here people. If we were talking about conversions, we would be discussing the merchants themselves. We are talking about you, your mission and ultimately whether you suck at copywriting or not.
Bounce Rate. Plain and simple. If you know your bounce rate and understand it, the rest comes easy.
Personally, it’s as simple as Google Analytics. If you’re scared of Google somehow stealing this data or rising your bids up because they know you are making money, then I suggest you seek alternatives. For simple purposes, Google Analytics is going to tell you straight up whether you have what it takes for people to click over.
First off, what is bounce rate?
In lame man’s terms it’s the percentage of people who leave your page. Bounce rate is not the end all, be all of how well your landing page does but it is a damn good source of information that tells you where you are wasting money.
Second, I only care about converting and making money so why do I care about bounce rate?
Of course conversions are important. You’re only successful of you get people to convert. However, bounce rate is a highly underused but very important metric you can use to increase your return on investment. If you thought that $400 a day net profit campaign was awesome, wait until you cut out the keywords that people are coming into your landing page and leaving on within 20 seconds.
Aha!
Yahtzee! I get it now. Your not talking about MAKING money, your talking about INCREASING it.
Here’s a simple scenario with keywords:
- weight loss
- lose weight
- lost weight
3 closely related keywords right? However, let’s not forget that EVERY keywords has it’s own story and people looking for all kinds of things when they type it in. In case you forgot, you should refresh yourself.
Looking into your Google Analytics account you find that weight loss has a 14% bounce rate vs lose weight at 27% and lost weight at 67%. Now along with bounce rate we need to gauge average time on site as well. Say that for a 14% rate on weight loss we had an average time of 4 mins 22 secs vs a 27% rate with lose weight who’s average time on site was 3 mins 17 secs and of course a 67% bounce rate on lost weight with people leaving the page 43 seconds after landing on.
A pattern emerges here that you need to watch closely. Just because they are leaving so quickly on the lost weight you still need to checking your CONVERTING keywords. Far too many times I’ve seen affiliates take this information and head to the butcher’s shop to destroy their campaigns. Ruck, you told me that those were shitty keywords LEADING people into my page. Yea it sure seems like it, but did you check your CONVERTING keywords? Hell, it may have only took those people 43 seconds on your site to say, “shit, I’m sold, where do I sign”.
If however you have a 67% bounce rate on 43 secs elapsed time on your site with no conversions, that my friends is a damn good sign that the keyword is costing you money.
BOUNCE RATE IS NOT A 100% ACCURATE METRIC TO EVALUATE CONVERSIONS.
Bounce rate IS however an excellent tool that will help you PREDICT conversion rates. Let’s face it, we need all the help we can get too. 
Hopefully this sheds a bit of light on bounce rate and how to use it. I would like to follow up tomorrow with some very useful information for you SEO’s out there who like to use blogs and real content packed sites for paid traffic. Bounce rate is an invaluable tool and I want to show you an excellent time saver in only constructing money making pages vs pages of content in general.
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Ruck,
I have quite a different opinion of the bounce rate parameter in Google Analytics. For me, bounce rate has been very inaccurate. One thing I closely monitor is the click through rate to the offer page from my sales page. Every time a visitor clicks on the offer, I call the urchin.js so that the click is registered by Google Analytics. In addition, I am also using Prosper202 to measure traffic.
As an example, for one of my campaigns the click through rate is 25-40% but Google reports bounce rate greater than 90%!! Average time on the site is less than 1 minute. However, the campaign is still fairly profitable.
BTW, I would love to see an example of low bounce rate (<70%) landing page. I have never been able to achieve it.
I use conversion prophet, and it has a feature that lets you see the bounce rate in stages – using the AIDA principle. It shows you the percentage of visitors that are still one the page after xx, xx, and xx seconds (you can set the seconds yourself). And Ruck, you’re right, you can pretty much tell what converts better by looking at that.
Webtrend, I have a page that has a bounce rate of 32% (measured by google). Everything is above the fold (hero shot, short paragraph of copy, and 2 calls to action), and it also has geo targeting (inserts the state of a user dynamically in the text), and a countdown timer.
Ruck,
I see three things in play here.
1. bounce rate
2. average time
3. conversions
But in your examples, even if bounce rate is high, average time is less, if conversions are good. It is fine.
Ultimately conversions is what matters.
I am still not sure, how bounce rate is helping me here.