The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

As a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertiser, you are paying for each and every click generated via your Adwords, YSM & MSN campaigns. If a user clicks on your ad, arrives at your landing page and immediately “bounces” away to another site – rather than delving deeper into your site and eventually converting – you’re paying for a click that costs you money with little to no return.

There are several factors that facilitate a high bounce rate:
1) The keywords you have selected are not relevant to the topics presented on your landing page.
2) Your landing page is not intuitive or – worse yet – poorly designed.
3) You may be the victim of click fraud.

What is an acceptable bounce rate?
It is impossible to assign a direct value for an acceptable bounce-rate. Ultimately, it depends on your site's goal and your vertical (the type of product or service you are promoting). Nonetheless, analytics gurus suggest that a bounce rate of over 50% is worrisome and warrants immediate attention. 

What can I do to minimize bounces?
As discussed earlier, the main causes for high bounce rates are bidding on the wrong keywords and/or displaying the wrong content on your landing page. In both cases there is a disconnect between the user’s intention and the information you are presenting to them when they click on your ad.

How do I determine my bounce rates?
To start [run a keyword report] in any third party analytics tool (Google Analytics is a great free solution). Sort your keywords in descending order by the “Bounce Rate” or “Bounce %.” This will allow you to quickly identify the keywords that are driving visitors away from your site upon visit.

It is important to note that you should not take action on keywords that have generated only a few clicks. Instead, focus on those that have a generated substantial number of clicks and have consistently produced a bounce rate of over fifty percent.

Are you noticing any patterns? Do most of your high bounce rate keywords revolve around the same topic? If this is the case, you may have an issue with connecting with your users.

Another great way to quickly eliminate high bounce rate keywords from your PPC campaign is by using negative keywords. If you have access to search query reporting or traffic logs, this will not be a challenging task. If you do not have advanced search query reporting reference the following site for additional information.

Summary
In order to mitigate the risks associated with high bounce rates, you must identify which keywords are driving the problem and include the relevant negative keywords. Lastly, revisit your landing pages and try to identify or create new and more engaging landing pages. If your adgroup is focused on "green widgets," choose a landing page that clearly represents "green widgets". But remember: adding complexity and additional content does not always mean you will have a more effective landing page. Almost always, clarity and simplicity win out: keep your landing pages clear and to the point.

If after several weeks you do not see an improvement in your bounce rates, you may want to consider analyzing your account with a click fraud monitoring service like ClickForensics. If a click is generated with malicious intent, keyword and landing page relevancy will do little to prevent a "bounce" from occurring.

By reducing your bounce rate, you will effectively see a decrease in wasteful costs and an increase in relevant traffic coming to your site.

Tony, Clickable SEM Guru
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.