Is 60% actually high for a blog/forum? I’m not a professional but I was under the impression that it varied drastically based on what your website is, and that blogs/forums are naturally really low. I’d imagine it would be especially true for LessWrong, simply because of the nature of the material.
Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate
40-60% Content websites
30-50% Lead generation sites
70-98% Blogs
20-40% Retail sites
10-30% Service sites
70-90% Landing pages
This is what a cursory search pulled up. Is this way off base, or is 30% more realistic for a forum?
Edit: As a side note, I’m also having trouble making bullet point lists inside of a quote. I can make them fine outside a quote, but it’s just not working inside. Anyone know how to do that? Editx2: Awesome, thank you loup-vaillant on the code. Looks like I needed extra line breaks there.
If the majority of the users were returning visitors, I wouldn’t be concerned about the bounce rate (but then I’d have to wonder why the site wasn’t getting new visitors.) If I felt the front page did a good job of putting something awesome in your face (instead of hiding it behind a link) then I wouldn’t be concerned. If the sitepoint graph showed the site growing as quickly as 50% new users per month implies it could, I’d assume the bouncers were returning visitors. It’s that combination of factors that makes me think that new visitors are going away and that the web marketing has room for improvement.
A lot of blogs have only a single page—that single page nature may be why they’ve got a higher bounce rate compared with other types of sites because new visitors get the content they were looking for on the first page, and because there’s not anything else to do but read. Yes, you can read every post if it’s really interesting (Hyperbole and a Half was like that for me.) but 90% of the time I’m just grabbing a recipe real quick or trying to figure out how to fix my blender and the information I need is right on the first page, then I’m done. These single page blog sites aren’t a gateway into a community. And LessWrong isn’t a place with practical information where you’re doing a quick question run. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this place attracts intellectuals who love reading. Assuming that’s the sort of person coming here, we have to ask why new visitors are not clicking. It’s not because they’re satisfying their reading fix on the front page as with a single-page blog. The front page doesn’t have a lot of text. If they have an intellectual nature, and are expecting to read something interesting, they should be showing more curiosity about other pages. That they’re not means the page failed to interest them. Why else would a new visitor leave without clicking on something when you think about the current home page design?
When it comes down to it, there’s no right number. Every website and situation is different. You can find people saying “oh 60% is normal” and other people saying “60 percent! You should be worried!” but when it comes down to it, it really depends on the situation.
And then, you also have to ask yourself this:
Do I want to tell myself my bounce rate is okay or do I want to get as many repeat visitors as possible?
If it’s the former, 60% is okay. If it’s the latter, especially if you’ve got that many new visitors not becoming returning visitors, 60% is totally unacceptable.
Good marketing techniques can bring the bounce rate down to 30%. Can they do that for this website? I don’t know. I say that it’s time to make a hypothesis about what would work and do the experiment of trying it out.
If you would like a reputable source of information on this, you can try this Google video. I assume they know what they’re talking about because they probably profit off of helping website owners make their websites better, since a lot of those people use their adwords service on their websites—I’ve been told they care quite a bit about profiting off of that:
FWIW, for http://www.gwern.net since the beginning, the bounce rate on my main/index page (as a landing page) is 31% on 47% new visits. Whether that is very good or very bad compared to LW, I will leave it to experts like Epiphany to say. (If it’s very good, I think it suggests a design strategy like ‘include a list of LW Greatest Hits/mind candy with brief tantalizing summaries’.)
As a (typical?) user of gwern.net I’ll point out that I had was already familiar with your work from other sources. Also, if many of your new users com from LW there is likely a pre-screening effect.
I do get a lot of traffic from LW, yes, but generally they’re going straight to specific pages like the modafinil page. The frontpage gets much less from LW according to the Analytics, although you’re right that the bounce rate for LWers is one of the lowest.
For bullet points, what works for me is to either use asterisks and separate the bullet points by blank lines, or add 2 spaces to the end of lines that I want to break.
That usually works for me, but the quotes just seem to mess things up. Specifically quotes with bullet points after a quote without a bullet point seem to cause troubles.
Bullet point
Quote with bullet point
Quote
Quote but no bullet point
Edit: After testing, it seems that the first item on the list controls whether anything can be a bullet point within a quote. Odd, but at least I understand it now.
Editx2, Ah shoot. Now I can’t figure out how to escape quotes properly. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
* Bullet point
> * Bullet point inside quote inside bullet point
> > Quote inside quote inside bullet point.
> >
> > * Aaand the bullet point!
> >
> > [non-breakable space (the actual one, not ' ')]
>
> Looks like it works.
Is 60% actually high for a blog/forum? I’m not a professional but I was under the impression that it varied drastically based on what your website is, and that blogs/forums are naturally really low. I’d imagine it would be especially true for LessWrong, simply because of the nature of the material.
This is what a cursory search pulled up. Is this way off base, or is 30% more realistic for a forum?
Edit: As a side note, I’m also having trouble making bullet point lists inside of a quote. I can make them fine outside a quote, but it’s just not working inside. Anyone know how to do that?
Editx2: Awesome, thank you loup-vaillant on the code. Looks like I needed extra line breaks there.
If the majority of the users were returning visitors, I wouldn’t be concerned about the bounce rate (but then I’d have to wonder why the site wasn’t getting new visitors.) If I felt the front page did a good job of putting something awesome in your face (instead of hiding it behind a link) then I wouldn’t be concerned. If the sitepoint graph showed the site growing as quickly as 50% new users per month implies it could, I’d assume the bouncers were returning visitors. It’s that combination of factors that makes me think that new visitors are going away and that the web marketing has room for improvement.
A lot of blogs have only a single page—that single page nature may be why they’ve got a higher bounce rate compared with other types of sites because new visitors get the content they were looking for on the first page, and because there’s not anything else to do but read. Yes, you can read every post if it’s really interesting (Hyperbole and a Half was like that for me.) but 90% of the time I’m just grabbing a recipe real quick or trying to figure out how to fix my blender and the information I need is right on the first page, then I’m done. These single page blog sites aren’t a gateway into a community. And LessWrong isn’t a place with practical information where you’re doing a quick question run. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this place attracts intellectuals who love reading. Assuming that’s the sort of person coming here, we have to ask why new visitors are not clicking. It’s not because they’re satisfying their reading fix on the front page as with a single-page blog. The front page doesn’t have a lot of text. If they have an intellectual nature, and are expecting to read something interesting, they should be showing more curiosity about other pages. That they’re not means the page failed to interest them. Why else would a new visitor leave without clicking on something when you think about the current home page design?
When it comes down to it, there’s no right number. Every website and situation is different. You can find people saying “oh 60% is normal” and other people saying “60 percent! You should be worried!” but when it comes down to it, it really depends on the situation.
And then, you also have to ask yourself this:
Do I want to tell myself my bounce rate is okay or do I want to get as many repeat visitors as possible?
If it’s the former, 60% is okay. If it’s the latter, especially if you’ve got that many new visitors not becoming returning visitors, 60% is totally unacceptable.
Good marketing techniques can bring the bounce rate down to 30%. Can they do that for this website? I don’t know. I say that it’s time to make a hypothesis about what would work and do the experiment of trying it out.
If you would like a reputable source of information on this, you can try this Google video. I assume they know what they’re talking about because they probably profit off of helping website owners make their websites better, since a lot of those people use their adwords service on their websites—I’ve been told they care quite a bit about profiting off of that:
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1009409
FWIW, for http://www.gwern.net since the beginning, the bounce rate on my main/index page (as a landing page) is 31% on 47% new visits. Whether that is very good or very bad compared to LW, I will leave it to experts like Epiphany to say. (If it’s very good, I think it suggests a design strategy like ‘include a list of LW Greatest Hits/mind candy with brief tantalizing summaries’.)
As a (typical?) user of gwern.net I’ll point out that I had was already familiar with your work from other sources. Also, if many of your new users com from LW there is likely a pre-screening effect.
I do get a lot of traffic from LW, yes, but generally they’re going straight to specific pages like the modafinil page. The frontpage gets much less from LW according to the Analytics, although you’re right that the bounce rate for LWers is one of the lowest.
For bullet points, what works for me is to either use asterisks and separate the bullet points by blank lines, or add 2 spaces to the end of lines that I want to break.
That usually works for me, but the quotes just seem to mess things up. Specifically quotes with bullet points after a quote without a bullet point seem to cause troubles.
Bullet point
Edit: After testing, it seems that the first item on the list controls whether anything can be a bullet point within a quote. Odd, but at least I understand it now.
Editx2, Ah shoot. Now I can’t figure out how to escape quotes properly. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
Let’s see…
Source code (indent with 4 spaces):
Now…
Bullet point
Source code: