Talking About Bounce Rates
I’m a holistic author coach who helps frustrated authors find the best publishing path to bring their books to life, so they can slay their inner demons and write without fear.
So why am I talking about tech here? Because part of being a holistic author coach is helping the inner AND outer authors. That means using my tech goddess skills to slay your “I’m not technical” demons. Got technical demons? I’ll help you battle them. Contact me to find out how.
Bounce rates. They’re the cornerstone of website analytics, you know checking to see who is visiting your author website, finding out what pages they saw, how long they stayed, and where they went. The bounce rate is what percentage of visitors went to your website, then left from the same page. They didn’t stop and browse; they didn’t read multiple blog posts. They came. They saw. They left.
On one hand, a high bounce rate may indicate that your website isn’t capturing a reader’s interest. Depending on what page they started at, they could have come to the front page of your site, decided they didn’t want to explore further. Or, they could have gone to a page listing your book, then immediately clicked on an Amazon link to make a purchase. One indicates a disengaged reader. The other is a reader ready and willing to buy your book. Yet both register as the same bounce rate.
This image below is a quick screen grab of a website that is in progress and at one hand the bounce rate isn’t good. I know that. I’m working on resolving it. But also, there are a lot of book pages showing all sales links, and there are some guest blog posts posted, where people would come, read the guest blog post to support the guest author, and then leave. So that bounce rate doesn’t reflect how disengaged my visitors are. They simply are showing up for different things.
The next thing to do would be to look at the landing pages and then see where your readers are going once they leave that page. It means a deeper dive into your website analytics number. And that’s a blog post topic for another time.
The take away is this: your bounce rate doesn’t tell the entire story. Sometimes a high bounce number isn’t a bad thing at all.
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