What Is The Bounce Rate?

Sounds fun doesn’t it? Unfortunately depending on the nature of your website a bad bounce rate can kill it. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only view one page on your website before leaving. Or in it’s simplest terms:-

Visitor -> Landing Page -> Gone!

If you have 20 visitors in a day and 5 follow the pattern above then you have a 25% bounce rate.

What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

20% – Done. No I’m joking. There are plenty of factors that influence what should be considered a good bounce rate and most important of all is the nature of your website.

If you are running a business website to garner enquiries/sales then ideally you want your visitors to browse your website before making an enquiry or buying. Even if they go from landing page to enquiry form that shouldn’t count as a bounce. With this type of website anything above around 60% is generally considered bad. Anything in the 30 percent range or lower is considered very good. The other time where you’ll want a low bounce rate is if you are trying to build a community for your website. You want people to browse around, seeing what you’re about and joining in. If you are running a blog or forum and see a high bounce rate then it tells you straight away there is something wrong.

However if you are running a website for the purposes of profiting from PPC (pay per click) advertising such as Adsense then a high bounce rate can be a very good sign. Remember that a user clicking on an advert to take them to a different website from where they landed on yours is counted as a bounce. The ideal situation is that a visitor lands on a relevant page on your website from a search in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, reads your article and then clicks on a relevant advert. That is what contextual advertising is all about. The visitor has consumed as little of your resources as possible and generated income by clicking on the advert. I love to see 80%+ bounce rates on the content where I want PPC income. I don’t want them clicking around my website looking at content that might not really interest them!

Brand vs Keywords?

That’s a no brainer for me, I’m not a PR person, I don’t build brands, I’ve found that social media/bookmark traffic does jack all for me. When I buy a domain I want to put a website on it and attract search engine traffic so that I can make money. If I wanted to build a website about gold coloured shoes the very first domain I’d go after would be goldshoes.com NOT magicfeet.com, twinkletoes.com, acefootwear.com or anything similar.

Hyphens Or No Hyphens?

First choice is no hyphens but don’t let that put you off. If you can get what you want with 2 or less hyphens then don’t sweat it. If you can’t then it’s time to start looking at other TLD (top level domains) Keep in mind that if you buy a domain with lots of hyphens and your page URLs have lots of hyphens then that suddenly starts to look like spam to the search engines.

Can My Choice Of TLD Hurt My Website?

In my own personal experience, no. In the same respect there is no automatic bonus by having a certain TLD. The only reason I favour .com is because it’s what most people auto assume when you talk about a domain name. At the end of the day it all comes down to the website you build on the domain and the links that point to it. Where TLD’s like .info get a bad reputation is that people buy them up because they’re cheap and then either build crap or nothing at all on them. A .info is the cheapest way of getting a spam site up. That doesn’t make all .info domains automatically bad for SEO. I’ve seen no proof of a default penalty for .info domains. In fact I know of a couple that make very good money and rank very well In the same way the highest earning website I’m personally aware of is neither a .com, .net nor .org

That’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned. If I’m building a website to target a certain search phrase then the perfect domain for me would be searchphrase.com, failing that search-phrase.com, if that wasn’t available then I would either go thesearchphrase.com or maybe searchphrase.net (depending on what mood I’m in).

The one thing I should emphasise is the significance of having your keyword heavily weighted and as close to the beginning of your domain name. When I first started this website it was called themakeoneyonline.net – as you can tell that’s quite far down my list in terms of finding an available domain name. It worked though and over the period it was called that it captured a decent amount of search traffic for people searching for “make money online” related phrases. Here’s the thing, since I changed to moneyschemes.net that traffic has completely gone. It doesn’t matter that all the old links with anchor text “make money online” are being forwarded on and that even to this day new links with related anchor text are still being created. This site lost it’s ranking for that and related terms within weeks of me changing the domain name.

So picking a domain name = important (but simple).

What Is A Click Through Rate?

Your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is the number of times that a link is followed(clicked) for ever 100 impressions. It is one of the key basic metrics in making money online. If a link appears on your page for 50 impressions and gets clicked once then you have a click through rate of 2%. If you have a link that appears on 5,000 impressions and gets 500 clicks then you have a click through rate (CTR) of 10%. Click through rate applies equally to any sort of link, be it text or image. Measuring your CTR is one of the best ways of gauging how ANY ADVERTS YOU HAVE PAID FOR are performing and also how any ADVERTS YOU’RE SHOWING are performing.

Where Is CTR Important?

CTR counts most in 3 areas of making money online. The first of these is with Google Adwords*. Adwords is Google’s advertising network that allows advertisers to bid on search phrases and show adverts either through their search results or on publisher’s websites. CTR is very important with Adwords because the higher the CTR you can achieve with your adverts the lower you can make your bid price! Having a high CTR can save you a lot of money in the cost of each click. As a general rule any advert/phrase on Adwords that is getting below a 1% CTR is considered bad. 2%-5% is considered in the normal range and anything above that I think most advertisers would consider being good.

Secondly CTR is very important to anybody showing pay-per-click advertisements such as Google Adsense. With pay-per-click (PPC) you are only paid when somebody clicks on an advert so it is absolutely in your best interest to experiment with how any adverts are displayed to get the best possible CTR. With Adsense the higher the CTR the better, it’s hard to give a general rule as it is very dependent on what type of traffic your website attracts but personally I worry if any of my pages are returning a less than 2% CTR with Adsense. Some Micro Niches often generate Adsense click through rates in excess of 20%! It’s not just Adsense that provides pay-per-click advertising. A large number of other ad networks will allow you to show adverts on a PPC basis and for all of these the CTR is one of the most important stats to monitor.

The final place where I think that CTR is very important is with affiliate marketing landing pages. Back in the good old days you used to be able to pay for an advert on Adwords and direct the traffic straight to an advertiser where they either bought or they didn’t. This gave you another metric – conversion rate, which I’ll go into another day. However, now this type of action is discouraged. Most affiliate marketers instead put the traffic onto a page of their own, called a landing page. The job of the landing page is to get as many people as possible to click through to the offer and sign up. In having this “in-between” page between the advert and the final sign-up page the CTR now becomes important. All ways of making money online are about percentages. In order to convert as many visitors as possible you need your landing page to have as good a CTR to the offer page as possible. I’m not a big fan of paid traffic so my own experiences with what CTR is normal in these circumstances could be way off but for me I like to see at least a 50% CTR from my landing pages to the offer.

So there you have it, a brief summary of what click-through-rates mean and a few examples of what is “normal”. If you’ve got any comments or think I’ve missed anything please leave a comment?

*Almost forgot, I only included Adwords in this because as far as I know they’re the only ad network that actively factors the CTR into the bid/position calculation. If anybody knows any different please feel free to leave a comment