Say you’ve been working hard with your AdWords account and you feel good about your results. CTR on ads and keywords is good. Conversion rate is okay, though not stellar. Where can you look for further improvement you think? Look in your analytics.
PPC Bounce Rate
To find your PPC bounce rate, log in to your analytics account. For most of you that will be Google Analytics (which I’ll be basing this post upon) but any analytics package worth its salt will have this data. In GA you’ll want to go to click on Traffic Sources in the left nav and then select Search Engines. For this example I then select Google in the main content section and then filter it to only paid traffic by clicking “paid”:
Now you’ll see just the performance of your AdWords keywords and we want to focus on bounce rate.
What It Tells You
As you can see, this keyword has a bounce rate near 90%. But what does that mean? It can mean a couple things:
- Wrong Stage – The purchase process involves numerous stages from interest to research to actual purchase. If the keyword is often used by prospects in the research phase and you’re putting them on a purchase page, you’ll likely see a high bounce rate.
- Broken Promises – The most likely explanation is the simplest; your ad piqued their interest, but the landing page didn’t deliver. They expected one thing and got something else.
- Multiple Meanings – Many words have different meanings. Toto can be a fancy Japanese toilet, Dorothy’s dog from the Wizard of Oz, or a famous rock band. Look at your keyword reports and put some negative keywords to work.
What else does PPC bounce rate tell you?
About Robert
Nice little article. Stuck to the facts. If only everyone would pay attention to the bounce rate. There are so many people wasting clicks and blowing the opportunity to market to a highly targeted lead.
Jason,
Seems so simple doesn’t it? Maybe I’ve just been in the industry so long it just seems like good common sense…
Hey Robert,
I was actually thinking about this very topic the other day. For B2B sites I’m not entirely convinced that bounce rate is a bad thing. Usually you are sending the user to a landing page honed for lead generation (ie: download this whitepaper, webinar, etc). If 10 users click your ad and 8 of them bounce while 2 convert you still have a conversion rate of 20% (with a bounce rate of 80%). Obviously you should continue to make sure your ads relate to your landing pages, but you are seeing a good conversion rate.
Additionally, even when I tell users within the ad that they should sign up for this whitepaper I still see some high bounce rates, but also good conversion rates. But alas, conversion rate can always be better.