RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

The one analytics metric you can’t live without (and one you should avoid)

Posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 4:59 PM by Jebadiah Roberts  |  Comments (0)

If the questions our analytics clients ask serve as any indicator, two of the most commonly misunderstood analytics reports are bounce rates and exits. But you can’t really blame anyone for conflating these reports. After all, both measure the number of times someone leaves your site. But when and why they left—and, more importantly, whether they were satisfied upon departure—is where the similarities usually end. So to clear up any confusion so you can measure more effectively, let’s look at how these metrics differ and how you should think about them within the context of your overall online strategy.

Focus on bounces for actionable insights

In the pecking order of analytics metrics, bounce rates place pretty close to the top. They’re tough to misinterpret, and they tend to be standardized across all analytics tools. More importantly, they immediately tell you what’s wrong with any of your site’s landing pages, meaning bounce rates are a highly actionable metric. No matter what tool you use, your bounce rate report will tell you the number of people who called up your site, did absolutely nothing, and left. In other words, it measures people who quickly realized your site wasn’t for them, and who clicked the “back” button just as abruptly as they arrived.

While the bounce rate for your entire site is an important barometer of its relative suckiness in the minds of your visitors, you should be especially concerned with the bounce rate for each of your top landing pages. Whether intended or not (remember that, thanks to search engines, people don’t always land on the pages you expect), these are the first pages that most of your visitors see, so a high bounce rate for any of them tells you whether your inbound links, keywords or pay-per-click ads are sending the wrong type of visitor to the wrong page. Fixing these leaks could be as simple as providing some introductory copy or a call to action on pages you didn’t think anyone landed on.

To make this report even more actionable, check the bounce rate of each of your top referrers. It’ll let you know, at a glance, who’s really driving qualified visits and who’s not pulling their weight as a referral partner. Next, check your bounce rate for each of your top keywords—both paid and organic. A high bounce rate for an organic keyword will tell you if you’ve optimized your site for a useless term, while high bounce rates for paid keywords will let you know if you’re wasting money driving untargeted visits.

Don’t be distracted by exits

Bounces are exciting, informative and immediately actionable. Exits, on the other hand, are sorely overrated. Your exit rate tells you exactly how many people left your site, regardless of what they did before they left. But while some people think this bigger picture of site “leakage” should be even more useful than immediate bounces, it’s not actionable in the least. Why? Because everyone who visits your site has to leave at some point. Even if they spend 20 minutes in spellbound appreciation of your content and they perform every desired action and goal completion your analytics tool lets you track, they’re still going to leave. And the vagueness of this metric means you can’t distinguish people who leave your site happy from those who leave frustrated, angry and determined never to return.

The exit rate exception

There’s one exception to the “ignore exit rates” rule: If you’ve cleverly planned your online conversion funnel in hopes that your prospects will follow a structured path from your intended landing page to a specific product page and all the way to a conversion page (and hopefully a “thank you” page), an exit from any of the pages before the conversion takes place—now called an “abandonment rate”—is definitely worth looking into and is definitely actionable. While bounce rates might help you assess the worth of an intended landing page for your funnel, they’re powerless when it comes to measuring the success of any of the equally important intermediary pages.

The distinction should now be clear: Bounces, which refer to people arriving and immediately wishing they hadn’t, are one of the quickest, easiest and most actionable glimpses into your site’s overall performance. And exits, which tally a notch every time someone leaves—whether for the right or wrong reasons—are essentially useless outside of your sales funnel. Plan your measurement accordingly, and you’ll gain quicker access to actionable information without wasting time on pointless metrics.

Tags: bounce rate, exit rate, sales funnel, web analytics