Bounce Rate Versus Average Visit Duration – Mobile Sites and Analytics for Photographers

One of my favorite things to do is to solve puzzles. Often unraveling a photographer’s website can be a challenge. The tons of info gathered from Google Analytics is a big puzzle. The perplexing part is determining what the info means and what action steps should I take based on this info.

I received the question from a client last week: “I logged into my Google Analytics and noticed my bounce rate was 68% which seems so crazy high – – but then the average length of visit is at 6+ minutes! I was wondering what your thoughts on this were? Is that bad?!? Which such a high bounce rate it’d seem like no one is interacting with the site…but with 6+ minutes what the heck are they staring at?!?!?!?”

Benji Craig from User Experience writes, “Pretend a shopping mall is a website.  Do you enter one entrance only?  No, you go to the entrance that is the closest to the stores you want either window shop or make a purchase.  The same concept applies to your website and people want the path of least resistance.  Most of the time, people want to get where they are going in the shortest path possible which means they are probably searching for the theme or topic they are interested in and then entering your website on the pages most closely related to their interest.”

ANSWER: 

You should look at the bounce rate for specific sources and see who is leaving and who is spending the most time looking at your site. The average bounce rate and average time on site are a little misleading.

For example, referrals from Facebook may be 100 visits with 30 minutes on site with a 7% bounce rate. Where referrals from Bing may be 200 visits with 1 minute on site with a 88% bounce rate.

The key is to understand who (where they come from) has the lowest bounce rate and is on your site the longest. Spend more time acquiring those visitors.

FOR EXAMPLE

In this example, my most engaged users are from Google+. With a 0% bounce rate, users are spending 10 minutes on my site visiting an average of 10 pages. However, they only account for 21 of my 507 visits that day. I can also gather that my mobile site is doing good because my bounce rate is under 2% and they are spending more time on my site than Facebook desktop viewers.

CONCLUSION

As it turns out, the client discovered that when there is no referral at all – – direct (none) they spend 22+ mins on the site! And that’s 68% of the new visits. Fascinating.

The number one source is Facebook Mobile and has a 90% bounce rate and less than a minute of time spent. Her thoughts are because her mobile site isn’t nearly as user-friendly as when on a desktop. When you try and navigate mobile on her site, it just brings up all the images and you can’t really navigate the site. She determined that she is losing a huge amount of traffic due to her low-quality mobile site.

This stuff is so fascinating.

Ask yourself these question… Who is engaging the most on your site? Where are they coming from? What is their behavior? Piece these questions together and figure out your action steps.

Do you have a question for me? Comment below AND I’LL HOOK YOU UP!