The correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate is not necessarily a straightforward answer. Many people believe there is no direct correlation between the two types of rates, but yet if you understand your bounce rate you can put things in place to change a bounce to a conversion thereby interlinking the numbers. Basically any correlation between whether people convert once they hit the landing page or whether they bounce is driven by the creators of the content. You can only trust that your understanding of the customers and the users can change how people see your website and therefore whether they ultimately convert in a way that is pleasing to your business model.
Bounce Rate
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Bounce rate is considered the number of users that hit your front page and go no further, often leaving with minimum time spent on your page and definitely not clicking through to other sites. Not only is this important to know because traffic doesn’t really count if it doesn’t stick but it also affects how you can attract advertisers. If an advertiser studies your analytics and realizes you are not keeping people on the page it is likely not worth their money to invest in advertising with you despite high initial numbers.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is how many hits you can turn into subscribers, purchases or information/leads. Depending on your site your goals will be different, but conversion generally means getting what you want out of the customer so you can contact them again in the future. It is important that you have a way to reach out to clients in order to keep them coming back.
Obvious Correlation
One of the most obvious and simplified correlations between the two rates comes from offering an instant incentive to stay on the page. If someone is bouncing off the page you can use a pop-up window to give a one-time offer or encourage them to leave information. If someone has landed on your website and is interested in the content you can change them from a bounce to a conversion. This is typically the best case scenario.
Complicated Conversion
If people are finding your site accidentally and the content does not match what they are looking for you are unlikely to be able to convert them. This does not mean you cannot collect valuable information from them. You can turn a bounce into a conversion in a different way by finding out how the traffic got to your site and why that direction was wrong for the user. A small, directed survey can often change how you spread the word on the web and eventually help you get more targeted traffic.
In general bounce rate and conversion rate add up to 90% of your traffic. The other 10% are people who look around but don’t convert. Obviously, you want the bigger piece of the 90% pie to land on conversion rather than bounce in order to keep your website successful and grow your business.
The correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate is always difficult to understand. Both newbies and experts also fail in this area, as they always don’t count on useful and reliable tracking tools to really know the true bounce and conversion rates. You need to get reliable tracking service, as not all the ones in the market really give true tracking results.
A good tracking tool from a reliable company will not count bots as human visitors, thus inflating your traffic level, giving a false conversion rate. A good service recognizes those automated tools and excludes them from results.
About Brandon Leibowitz
