@Mirjam- Visitors that click on ppc or aff. links are not counted as bounced, so unfortunately, your theory is incorrect. Unless I don’t get something…

If you are generating organic traffic to come to your blog and they arrive, read the first page and then leave to either your affiliate link or ppc … it really isn´t all that bad

Hell, it is better than having them leave through the backbutton!

Mirjam’s last blog post..My own Belief System Made it Impossible to Become Rich

Great to see you here.

I know. Google Benchmarking is a great tool, and I was just mentioning it in my previous post.

Unfortunately, you can’t be sure whether the sites you are compared to are also blogs and that they are of the same layout. Moreover, I am pretty sure they aren’t. Google says it divides sites into three categories for benchmarking: small, medium and large. That way you are comparing yourself to similarly sized sites, but not similarly designed. But, otherwise it is great to see where do you stand in comparison on other parameters as well.

But the nice things now is Google Analytics provides industry benchmarking, which means that you can use GA to compare your bounce rate to other comparable sites. This means you can come up with and use the most relevant benchmark for yourself.

-Avinash.

PS: Here is my own, old, post on bounce rate with lots of examples from different web analytics tools about how to use this valuable metric:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html

I’ve seen your follow-up now. I’m glad you’ve seen the light..

I think it is just another static to keep in mind, but especially when having a new blog, and using a way to generate traffic which is known to cause high bounce rate since most people that enter are there because of getting more drops, bounce rate is normal to be higher.

Whether it is ok to have that high of a bounce rate, well not really, but it is just another thing to keep in mind, without fretting about it too much.

Of course there are many things to do in order to lower it and the ways you mention do work, like you however I don´t want to force my bouncerate down at the cost of my visitor (making them go to the full article with a read more tag) but instead want to focus on better content, making the blog stickier through other ways.

Another great post!

Mirjam’s last blog post..I Bounce You Bounce – the Follow Up

75% BR might be disturbing only when I think how many people are continuing to read my older posts, since 75% means that not so many do so.

But, considering my blog’s authority and age, this is going to build up with time. I’ve already seen the power of making it easy for the reader to access my older posts by including the “featured articles” in my header, and installing the cool archives plugin.

Therefore it doesn’t raise alarm when I look at the 75%, but only reminds me that currently it is the way things are, and gives me an alternative to drastically change everything or ease things more naturally towards lower BR.

Thanks for the recommendation. Will check it out sometime.

Internal linking, good use of images, and short concise articles + combined with ability to write good headlines, and a good clincher = Awesome Bounce Rate!

I know that there isn’t a single blogger out there that wants to admit that they write bad headlines, but waaaaaaay over 90% of the blogs I visit have terrible and boring headlines.

I recommend a book called “Words That Sell”. It’s increased a lot of my statistics, and it’s made me more money!

Bryan Clark’s last blog post..Why You Want to Stumble

Bryan Clark’s last blog post..Why You Want to Stumble