Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/08/30-simple-ways-of-improving-bounce-rate-and-conversion-rate.html

by onreact-com • 17 years ago

13 7 17 years ago

patio113• 17 years ago

Decent advice, particularly where he plugs my software.

Kidding, kidding. Seriously, though, this bit right here:

Split visitors up according to source where they come from, returning visitors get different treatment as search and social media users

is not exploited NEARLY enough.

If you own a Wordpress blog, there is a plugin called What Would Seth Godin Do, which shows new visitors to your blog coming from search engines a discrete customizable prompt to sign up to your RSS feed.

You can expand on that general idea. Do you display advertisements? Do you display them to everyone equally? Do you have any reason to think that is optimal? Try splitting your users into two groups -- the community you've built (who are your core fans and spread your stuff) and transients (someone who just arrived off a Google search and, most probably, won't stick around). Nobody in the core fan group clicks on your ads, since they come there for you and not for AdWords -- so turn them off, and enjoy the increased visitor loyalty and spreadiness.

Many people in the Google search group are looking for something not on your page -- the AdWords ad (and Google) gives them a second bite at the search apple. Show them the ads.

This will result in vastly higher measured CTRs and higher quality traffic (no misclicks from core users who were aiming for something else), which will make your advertisers happy and might well be revenue maximizing, while making your regular users love you even more.

P.S. Did I hear someone say you could split test this?

onreact-com2• 17 years ago

"You can expand on that general idea. Do you display advertisements? Do you display them to everyone equally?"

This suggestion has already been implemented with another plugin. It's called "Who Sees Ads":

http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/wordpress-plugin-who-s...

patio113• 17 years ago

Thank you, that is going in the bag of tricks.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Another handy way to use this is to decide if you want to drop advertising for your 'core', whether that's smart of not greatly depends on the relative sizes of search engine traffic vs repeat visitors to your site.

aichcon• 17 years ago

I'm curious - what are people's experiences with controlling bounce rates on sites that extensively use AJAX? A user could easily visit my page and browse a great deal of content without a second page request needing to be called. As I understand it, even if they spent 10 minutes using the AJAX functionality and left, they would count as a bounce.

I essentially see it as a tradeoff between usability and SEO-friendliness, but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on it. I've considered doing something where the first click would perform a page refresh but subsequent calls would fall back onto the AJAX functionality but that seems a bit silly.

patio113• 17 years ago

If you're heavily AJAXed up then bounce rate is a meaningless metric for you. I don't know why you'd spend time optimizing for it -- instead, measure a meaningful metric (such as average number of interactions, or number of visitors with at least one interaction, or -- my personal favorite -- sales).

onreact-com2• 17 years ago

I think there must be a way to mimic the bounce rate in AJAX by firing the onclick event to make it meaningful again.

Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate

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