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?
