How do you make sure that relevant visitors landing on your site know that they’ve landed on the right page? If you don’t succeed in doing this effectively a large number of your visitor are going to bounce. Ensuring that first time visitors can immediately engage with your site directly affects your site’s ability to convert visitors into real business.
When looking at this it is easy to get caught up in looking at your main landing pages to the exclusion of the other pages. At RevaHealth.com we have historically focused on our search results pages to the exclusion of pages deeper in the site.
Old Page
However, times change and we have over 1.5 million pages indexed by Google. Every month Google sends traffic to a about 250,000 different pages including a large number of deep and seemingly unimportant pages. The vast majority of landings are still on our main search results pages; however there are an increasing number of visitors landing on individual clinic’s profiles.
These profile pages all had a disproportionally large bounce rate when compare to the rest of the site and looking at the pages it should come as no surprise. For an engaged audience they present the information in a reasonably structured fashion, however for a visitor who has just landed on the page it’s a bit difficult to see why they should stick around.
The most obvious way to reduce bounce on these pages would be to eliminate the advertising. However these pages rely on advertising for revenue generation, so we elected to see if we could reduce the bounce rate while attempting to keep advertising revenue static.
We introduced a navigation panel on the right hand side. The purpose of this panel is to inform the visitor about relevant content in the rest of the site. The key points are:
New Page
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The number of relevant clinics in the immediate area that they might be interested in.
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Up to three sample clinics in the immediate area.
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The number of relevant clinics in a broader geography with a means of navigating to them.
Other changes we made to the page were:
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A new call to action within the address field – “Get Phone Number”. About 20% of the visitors to our site are actively looking for a clinic’s telephone number. We don’t want to immediately display this number because we want to track it, however we absolutely want visitors to know that it is available.
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Introduction of default Description Text where we do not have a description of the clinic along with a call to action.
After making these changes, the bounce rate of the profile pages dropped by nearly 7%, causing an overall drop in the site’s bounce rate of just over 2%.
We’d love to hear your experiences with bounce reduction, especially any unexpected results you had.
Very interesting, and a great share.
How did you test this Caelen?
Lovely example. Reading so many SEO is dead posts recently but it is crucial for stuff like this. Defo be interested to see how you tested it broken down into more detail.
Hi Richard – this is an interesting question because we couldn’t use Google Analytics to measure the bounce rate of specific categories of pages. This is because of our URL structure, which doesn’t include the type of page. So we were forced to calculate bounce rate from our own application logs which was a lot more difficult than you would think – but that’s another blog post.
Thanks for the ongoing sharing Caelen
If you are split testing this then you could use Virtual Views in GA to segment and measure Bounce Rate.
GA also introduced an API, and the new V4 version released today might have some very interesting features for you Caelen.
I’d imagine there might be some way to code a function for GWO that could measure success by time spent on page, or the existence of the cookie that shows users came from another page in the current section. Of course you could just set every page on your site as a goal, so the conversion would trigger when the test subject visited another page in the current session. You’d then just have to segment by users landing on the test URLs and only show the test to them.
Interesting as bounce rate is a difficult one to test using conventional techniques.
Thanks Caelen,
I need to do something similar with one of my directory sites.
Alex
What Richard said is a good point to follow. I haven’t looked at your URL structure but you should be able to do this using virtual page views in Google Analytics. I would also keep an eye on the new Google Analytics changes. The intelligence functions is something that can provide great value, getting alerts when bounce rate fluctuates.
@Niall, You read SEO is dead posts every year since time began, it’s called link bait, the reason its always SEO is because its an SEO link building method, nothing new here. With Google Social Search on the way, expect lots more tiring posts ..
Interesting post, Rather than hire a consultant I’ve have developed my own online marketing strategy using information from google analytics, im always interested to read experts opinion. The bounce rate on my website is terrible but my blog is a lot better.
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