AVINASH KAUSHIK: I am a huge fan of the metric bounce rate.
So as of putting this deck together, I did not want to
recommend a metric, because I fundamentally believe that
there's no such thing as, oh, here are God's KPIs, and if
you measure them, you're fine.
That's like 10 year old methodology.
KPI, KPI, KPI.
Every business is different.
So my mindset is here's the data, here's an effective way
for you to navigate the data, you figure out what's best for
you, rather than me pontificating.
This is the one exception I will make.
Only exception today is a metric called bounce rate.
I love it.
I call it the sexiest metric ever.
And the reason I like bounce rate is because it is so
powerful, and so--
I call it brilliantly dumb.
Because it's really easy to understand what
a bounce rate is.
There's no need for definition.
Bounce rate defines this experience with a customer--
I came, I puked, I left.
Literally, that's the definition.
The other thing is, you all spend tons of money on
AdWords, and direct marketing, and affiliate marketing, and
all of those things.
And what this metric can help you understand is where are
you acquiring crappy traffic from, very quickly.
So it's easy for you to go in and say, oh, what's the bounce
rate on my site?
70% in this case.
So a lot of people wonder why their conversion rate is 1%.
Actually, for most of you, if you do e-commerce, I bet you
your conversion rate is 2%.
That's the average conversion rate in the United States of
America, whether you're selling
elephants or iPods, 2%.
If you're really good at direct marketing, your
conversion is probably closer to 30, 35%.
2%.
This is why your conversion rate is 2%, is most traffic
comes and leaves instantly.
And yet, when I do seminars, I go talk to companies, I'm
stunned at how few people actually know what the bounce
rate of their website is.
So I encourage you to do this.
Now it's possible that your bounce rate is more like this,
in which case it needs a love sign.
This is a great bounce rate.
On average, you'll find the bounce rate for your site will
fall between 40 to 60%.
It should probably be closer to this number.
It's a great bounce rate.
You cannot convince all the traffic on
your website to stay.
You can't.
Everybody has ADD.
You don't have what they want, they leave instantly.
So you can't win them all, right?
But that's a great bounce rate.
It's a fabulous bounce rate.
I was stunned but actually that's low.
The next thing you want to do is you say, I have all these
sites, they're sending me traffic, and I think if you
look at the graph, you'll notice it actually is trending
up and to the right.
Slowly, but it is trending up.
This is good to know.
This is nice.
But then you can say, where is all my traffic coming from?
OK, sweet, loveindeed.com and mail.google, working great.
I wonder what the bounce rate performance is.
They all are sending quickly unqualified traffic.
So it could be I'm running a wrong campaign, maybe this is
not a great place to go.
Bounce rate is a great qualifying metric.
It's a great metric that helps you ask the right questions.
Exact same thing here for search.
My keywords, what's my bounce rate?
I can actually look at my landing pages
and my bounce rate.
I love this one, by the way.
Definitely look at the top 20, 30 entry
pages to your website--
where people are entering--
and look at the bounce rate for those pages.
Because remember, your homepage is not the homepage
of your website.
This is where people are entering.
Are these pages doing as good a job on your website as your
homepage might be, where you spend a lot of love and
attention, making the perfect golden homepage in the world.
But what about these pages, where all
these people are entering?
Measure bounce rate at a site level.
Measure bounce rate for your core acquisition strategies.
Measure bounce rate for your top entry pages.
If you're spending money on AdWords, measure bounce rate
for your landing pages.
It will not give you all of the answers, but it will help
you quickly distill down where things are not going right.
Then you can say, is it that I'm bidding
on the wrong keyword?
Is it that the creative on my landing pages is wrong?
What's going on here?
It's a quick, qualifying metric.