My blog has this been listed this week on its first directories. Maybe too soon to look at bounce rates, I don’t know. Traffic before was mostly from SE’s, now overwhelmingly from directories. Bounce rate is the same as it was, averaging 60% (range is 33, 50, 59, 60, 60, 66, 66, 66, 77, 100). All my links are target="_blank" and open up in a new window. So I guess that’s pretty bad, right? Haven’t a clue why, and I wanted to wait a month or two to fill out my site before I put it up for review/critique. Do you have any idea why the bounce rate is so high? My site is in my signature. Thanks.
You have a lot of content on the first page. If surfers like your content they may be able to get off before ever going to another page.
Have you tried reducing the number of posts that show on your index page to see if it helps improve your bounce rate any?
Also, remember that someone is considered a bounce if they leave the front page via external link … so even someone that shows as a bounce may very well be a sold membership if they found what they were looking for on landing.
I have sites with an average of 4+ minutes on site per visitor and even that has bounce rates around 40%.
Well, I have only 3 posts per page (3 on homepage, etc.), with 5 to 8 pics for each post. I don’t think I should have only 2 posts per page, or do you think this is OK?
Going to a sponsor’s site from my site’s link is still a bounce if the sponsor’s link opens up in a new window? (BTW, to my knowledge I have not made any sales, but I only checked CCBill’s reports, though they handle most of my sponsors.)
It’s interesting how one of the directories has a 33% bounce rate, wonder why those surfers are so different.
Tim I won’t ask you for specifics, but if you are not looking at numbers that are large enough, you are not going to get a true bounce representation. Also, if your images are going to link to the sponsor, have them link to something that relates directly to the post. For instance, Young Bodybuilder Heartbreaker should go to his profile page. They clicked on his pic cause they liked him, not the latin guy on the page the image is linked to. Also confirm that you are going to get credit for the live cams and dvd sales that are promoted on that tour.
Mix up the text link you put at the end of each post and drop it at least one more time in that long series of images. Learn how to embed some video previews (if they are good ones).
Bloggers are our best selling affiliates. These are things the most successful ones do. I would also change out all the banners you are using. Ours, Mark Wolfs and Colts. In the muscle market, it is about connections and none of those banners make it. You need the model looking especially hot and into the lens. Avoid images with “porn face”.
Alex, the profile pages of Manifest Men have no place to click to join. In fact, only after playing for a while did I realize clicking on the title “Manifest Men” at the top of the page goes back to the homepage where there are purchase options. It’s just I cannot see the value of sending a surfer to a page on any site(s) that has no clear link(s) to join.
I don’t think target=_blank affects bounce rates at all. I think it refers to people who land on your page but close it without going deeper into your site / click on your links.
I noticed really bad traffic from for example TGPs would have a bounce rate of 80-90% on my sites. So having 60% on directory traffic probably isn’t so bad. People just might not be expecting what they get when they land on your page, which isn’t neccessarily a bad thing it’s just that they are not looking for your page at that time. After all they only click on a link after reading a vague description. Probably the nature of that type of traffic.
GayDemon.com for example has a bounce rate of 45%, and that’s with a very large amount of returning visitors and bookmarkers (40% of all visitors are bookmarkers). i doubt you will ever get a much better bounce rate than 40-50% unless you have 100% bookmark traffic.
Tim,
There is a join form on every content detail page as well as in the top navigation. The point of the profile page is to have a place to pull together all the content featuring a particular model. The link to the home page is indeed in the top logo (as on most mainstream sites).
The target=blank idea was discussed in the old bounce rate thread on GD, where it was said: “If your links to sponsors open in new tabs/windows (target=_blank), then a high bounce rate should make you worry, cause the click is not considered a bounce.” How that actually comes into play here, not sure.
I started with 5 pics a post and now have 8 sometimes. Maybe the large amount of content on my homepage that QueerLust mentioned is due to the larger number of pics. Maybe I should limit it to 5 pics because they are big pics. Like Alex, I think that some hot videos once in a while would be good, and will probably do this. However, I know of two experienced webmasters who don’t or rarely use video clips because they have little effect. Then the argument could be that’s what works for them, which may not be my case.
This gets back to my post on “making it - today.” It’s easy to frantically chase one’s tail about so many things, and waste a lot of time, and add considerable stress to one’s mental and physical health like this. I still believe in a calm, steady course. Informed and not blind, but after a certain point, you have to let things run their course is my guess at this point. I guess
You can keep your posts with more pics if you want, but if you do, I would trim it to 2 posts per page to see if that helps.
You could also keep it at 3 posts but use the read more tag after the first pic.
In fact, read more may be your best friend … If you look at the template at www.queerlust.com you will see that I use a cropped header graphic for each post; if they want the goods they have to click into the post.
That brought my own bounce rate down a little bit which is what I based my original suggestion on.
[QUOTE=gaydemon;68612]I don’t think target=_blank affects bounce rates at all. I think it refers to people who land on your page but close it without going deeper into your site / click on your links.
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Using target=_blank should in theory reduce the bounce rate as it will give surfers a better opportunity to go deeper in the site after clicking an image etc.
I Am not really sure why you have such a high bounce rate. Go into Analytics and under content do an overlay and see your traffic flow to internal pages. I would bet that surfers are just not clicking “recent posts” and “categories”. The only other place they can go after they scroll down is the “previous entries”.
If the site is making money then why even worry about the bounce rate? As it relates to Google, I stopped worrying about the bounce rate. On a site like this http://gayforpay.com/
I worry about the bounce rate as a high bounce means that surfers are not going to the gallery/video pages etc. and it wouldn’t be worth my time to do them if I couldn’t control my bounce.
On your blog, if you feel the three posts are not making the sales and you have a high bounce rate, why not add more posts to the front page?
