How to analyze and improve bounce rate with Google Analytics

In this article you can find what is bounce rate, how to measure bounce rate, how to analyze different aspects of bounce rate with Google Analytics and tips to improve bounce rate.

Bounce rate can be connected with the number of people who entered the site on a page and left right away. They visit only one page on the site and go away from site. We can say that those visitors are bounced.

A visitor can bounce by:

• Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site


• Typing other URL


• Closing an open window or tab


• Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site


• Session timeout

Bounce rate, according to Google Analytics, is the percentage of single-page visits. If we have bounce rate of 80% it means that 8 of 10 visitor come on the page of site A and then leave the site without single visit of any other page on site A.

So we can conclude lower bounce rate is better

• bounce rate of 50% is better than bounce rate of 70%


• bounce rate of 30% is even better than 50%...

Main advantage of bounce rate is that it is simple to understand. It tells you if visitors leave your site right away or if they actually navigate it and read it carefully. Everyone would agree that this is very important information.

Measuring bounce rate

We can measure bounce rate with a help of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to sign up and offer many indicators to follow your site. In my opinion it is most powerful web tool for tracking website statistics.

To view the bounce rates for your website in Google Analytics, go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.



Tracking bounce rate with Google Analytics tool can be very helpful. You can make some change on your site, track bounce rate in time interval and follow what is happening with bounce rate. Is it stay, grow or become lower?

Tracking bounce rate of individual pages

Very important is to know that with Google Analytics you are not restricted on tracking bounce rate only for your whole site. You can track bounce rate of every individual page on your site.

To track bounce rate of individual pages with Google Analytics you need:

• Click Content > Top Content


• Click on Page you want to track






• Content detail page for chosen page will be opened, choose bounce rate and you can see bounce rate graph for given page

Bounce rate by traffic sources and keywords

Visitors coming from different sources can behave differently. For example visitors coming from search engines try to find some answers and their behavior is much different from visitors coming from similar web site who can be more interested to your niche.
You can track bounce rate by different traffic sources with help of Google Analytics. Go to Traffic Sources > All traffic sources and you can discover bounce rate for traffic sources to your site.




There is also option to analyze bounce rate by keywords. For example you can find keywords with high bounce rate and put some new content using this keywords.
Let's say you have keywords "upload javascript to blogger" with 100% of bounce rate. First you must find landing page (landing page is page a web user reaches after clicking on the link in the Search Engines results page) for these keywords. After that you can add content connected to keywords or add new page to site with content about keywords and on landing page add links to this new page.
To see bounce rate by keywords go to Traffic Sources > Keywords.


Time and bounce rate in Google Analytics

Time has no effect on the Google Analytics calculation of bounce rate. A visit that lasts for 30 minutes with only one pageview is considered as a bounce. However, a visit that lasts for only 5 seconds with 2 pageviews is not considered as a bounce.

Google analytics session is able to tolerate 29 minutes of inactivity. A session will start upon landing on a site. If the user chooses to leave the site and navigate to another website, the session will still continue for a maximum of 29 minutes. As long as the user returns to the initial site and makes a click, it will not be considered as a bounce.

Tips to improve bounce rate

• You can start with your most visited pages. Optimize most visited pages with high bounce rate and follow bounce rate for those pages with Google Analytics.


• Link between your own articles as reference - if you have excellent article on Page A and have no links on other pages of your site visitor will read article and be bounced


• Try to find right keywords for your page - many visitors come from search engines, if they don't find expected content they leave


• Some people claim that web design is most important factor


• For blogs good advice may be to add sidebar with Top 10 articles or something similar


• By studying our site statistics we can find out which pages and keywords are most efficient, and by doing so, find a pattern for a better optimization.


• Write interesting and useful articles


• Check speed of your site - if it is too slow, visitors will go away


• Check how your site working on other browsers - if site don't work well on Chrome you will loose all surfers how using Chrome


• If you’re out-linking excessively, try to reduce the number of outgoing links

My related articles:
Simple explain of google pagerank

Top 10 things you can do with Wolfram Alpha

After some research of Wolfram examples I have find those 10 most interesting examples to share with the world. Some examples are useful and some are interesting. Examples are sorted by relevance. First example is most interesting and so on.

1. Get data about recent earthquakes - really impressive, you can see earthquakes in world map in last 24 hours (or broader time interval) by magnitude.
   
   Example : earthquakes
   
   To see you need to type earthquakes in wolfram alpha






2. Get salary data for a given occupation - Enter word salary and occupation. You will get salary data for entered occupation (median wage, history, people employeed ...).
   
   Example : salary progammer
   



3. Generate report for life expectancy - You will get median life expectancy, highest(with country)life expectancy, and lowest life expectancy. There are also life expectancy rankings by countries and more demographics data


Example :


• life expectancy


• life expectancy in Andora




4. Rank countries - you can rank countries by some criteria


Example :


• 5 richest countries


• 5 poorest country


You get first 5 countries by GDP per capita, by GDP and by poverty fraction.





5. Country comparison - compare two countries (by location, area, demographic data, economic)
   
   Example: America, India



6. Find the definition of a word - enter definition and word you want to define
   
   Example: define soldier
   
   Result: soldier - serve as a soldier in the military



7. Find words matching a pattern - write word and with exchanged letters with low line. This can be very helpful if you can't remember the word.
   
   Example: _oun_e_
   
   Wolfram will return:
   
   b | o | u | n | c | e | r
   b | o | u | n | c | e | s
   b | o | u | n | d | e | d
   b | o | u | n | d | e | n
   b | o | u | n | d | e | r
   c | o | u | n | s | e | l
   c | o | u | n | t | e | d
   c | o | u | n | t | e | r...




8. Find anagrams of word - type "anagrams" and desired word
   
   Example : smart
   
   Wolfram will return : marts and trams
   



9. Compute a time difference - type Date to Date and you will get time difference.
   
   Example: Mar 21, 2009 to Sep 7, 2009


Wolfram alpha return 5 months 17 days


10. Do a mortgage computation - you can calculate monthly payments, mortgage totals and payments and balances. Very nice.
    
    Example: mortgage 100,000 Euros, 7%, 25 years
    
    

Wolfram Alpha (also written WolframAlpha and Wolfram Alpha) is an answer-engine. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

My main objection on Wolfram Alpha is that I couldn't find list for some term. For example I wanted to get list of all occupations but didn't find a way. If you enter pharmacist in Wolfram it knows that it is occupation. Same thing for animals, dinosaurs...

Of course Wolfram Alpha can do many other things but those I found most interesting.

SEO glossary

There you can find SEO terms explained. I will regularly update this glossary. You can suggest your words in comment section.

B

Backlinks - are incoming links to a web page. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

H

Hyperlinks - clickable link in text or an image on a web page that takes you to another location within the same document, web page, web site or to a completely different location.

L

Link Popularity - refers to the total number of inbound links to a particular web site by different search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo etc.

N

Nofollow - is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

O

Outbound links - these are links that direct the Internet user to another website links, to another pages

P

PageRank - see PR

PR - PageRank, a Google patented method for measuring page importance or relevance; ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. PageRank of the page that is casting the vote is very important. Higher PageRank of voter page means better PageRank for voted page. For more details see Introduction to Google PageRank.

S

Spamdexing - (also known as search spam or search engine spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system

Spoofing - impersonating another person or computer, usually by providing a false email name, URL or IP address.

Simple explain of Google PageRank

PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. "PageRank" or "PR" is a term to indicate the popularity of a page. The popularity of a webpage, according to Google, is determined by the number of links from other pages on the World Wide Web that point to this page.

In this article you can learn :

• What is PageRank


• How to check Google PageRank


• PageRank value


• How PageRank is calculated (briefly)


• PageRank facts


• PageRank algorithm

What is PageRank

PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. PageRank of the page that is casting the vote is very important. Higher PageRank of voter page means better PageRank for voted page.

PageRank does not directly influence a web page's ranking in the search engine results. Google PageRank doesn’t determine which webpages are included in the search results when a search term is entered into Google; that is determined by the relevance of titles, keywords and phrases contained within those pages. But in case two web pages have the same relevance to a search term, Google page rank will determine which page is displayed first in the search results. So Pagerank can be very important for SEO.


How to check Google PageRank

You can check PageRank of web page with Page Rank Checker. In order to check pagerank of web page enter web address and click "Check PR" button.



Another option is to install google toolbar in your web browser. I prefer SearchStatus for Firefox.

PageRank value

PageRank value goes from 0 – 10. Higher pagerank value is better. 0 is bad pagerank value, 10 is best pagerank value.
Page www.google.com is one of most popular pages and has Pagerank 10.
My blog interestigwebs.blogspot.com unfortunately is not so popular and have PageRank (PR) 2.
Each Page Rank level (1 - 10) is progressively harder to reach. PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale.
On the picture you can see approximately number of web sites with different PageRank value (most are in PR 1 and least are in PR 10):



Caution, difference between number of sites for each PageRank value is probably bigger. Picture is only for demonstration purpose.

It is possible to make this classification:

1. Pagerank 0 - 3 new webpages or those with very few back links


2. Pagerank 4 - 5 popular pages with a lot of back links from similar sites


3. Pagerank 6 exceptionally popular sites with hundreds of links from authority sites


4. Pagerank 7 - 10 usually media brands, big corporations, or government sites

How PageRank is calculated

The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of backlinks (backlink is a link pointing to a page) as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and Spamdexing, Google provides no specific details about how other factors influence PageRank.


Three most important rules for PageRank:

• PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them - relevance and quality are important

Example: for page A is better to have 100 incoming links (backlinks) then 10.


• PageRank of page on which is incoming link is important
  
  Example: for page A is better to have incoming link from page B with PageRank 5 then from page C with PageRank 2.
  
  



• PageRank of page on which is incoming link (backlink) is divided by the number of outbound links on that page, more outbound links on page with incoming link means lower PageRank contribution to linked page
  
  Outbound links - links to other pages
  Example: for page A is better to have incoming link from page B which links only on page A then from same page B which links on multiple pages.
  
  

PageRank Facts:

• Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank



• Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated



• PageRank does not rank web sites as a whole, but is determined for each page individually



• Each Page Rank level (1 - 10) is progressively harder to reach. PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale.



• Google calculates pages PRs permanently, but we see the update once every few months



• Links with nofollow-attribute don’t contribute to Google PageRank - if page A have nofollow link to page B, pagerank of page B will not be increased



• Efficient internal onsite linking has an impact on PageRank



• Multiple votes to one link from the same page cost as much as a single vote



• No one knows for sure how PageRank is currently calculated by Google



• Page Rank can decrease. You can lose some important links that are no longer linking to your site. PR loss can also occur if some of your linking partners also experience a drop in their own PR, possibly setting off a chain reaction of lower PageRank all through the immediate linking network.



• Site can be banned if it links to banned sites. Don’t link to banned sites, Google will penalize you for bad links so always check the PageRank of the sites you’re linking to from your site.



• Some people said that bounce rate influence on PageRank in new Google PageRank algorithm, author of this article is doubtful for this

PageRank Algorithm

The formula is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

• PR(A) is the PageRank of page A


• PR(Ti) is the PageRank of pages Ti which link to page A


• C(Ti) is the number of outbound links on page Ti


• d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1

PageRank of page A is defined by the PageRanks of those pages which link to page A.
PageRank contribution of page T to page A is always weighted by the number of outbound links C(T) on page T. This means that the more outbound links a page T has, the less will page A benefit from a link to it on page T.
Finally, the sum of the weighted PageRanks of all pages Ti is multiplied with a damping factor d which can be set between 0 and 1.

For more details about PageRank algorithm check:

• The PageRank Algorithm


• Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it

Impact of transition from PR 1 to PR 2 on my blog

PageRank of my blog increased to PageRank 2 from PageRank 1 in beginning of April. It has impact on visits. In March there was 1010 unique visitors while in April there was 1889 unique visitors.




Terms:

Backlinks - are incoming links to a web page. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Hyperlinks - clickable link in text or an image on a web page that takes you to another location within the same document, web page, web site or to a completely different location.

Link Popularity - refers to the total number of inbound links to a particular web site by different search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo etc.

Nofollow - is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Outbound links - these are links that direct the Internet user to another websitelinks, to another pages

PR - PageRank, a Google patented method for measuring page importance or relevance; ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best.

Spamdexing - (also known as search spam or search engine spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system

Spoofing - impersonating another person or computer, usually by providing a false email name, URL or IP address.



Further information and resources:

The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works
PageRank Wikipedia
Pagerank-building


Related articles:

Bguide: Alexa traffic rank