What is a good website bounce rate and how do you optimize it?

Are you concerned about low quality website traffic? And you need a traffic quality management solution? Unlike Google Analytics, Clicktale, and Clickly, weve developed a tool we call threat and engagement analytics. Threat and Engagement analytics will provide a threat score for all your website visitors, it will provide an engagement score for only real visitors, it will identify invalid advertising clicks along with low quality traffic, and finally it will increase your return on advertising spend.
The core problem with website traffic starts with Bounce Rate. Bounce rate occurs when a visitor enters your website and leaves within a few seconds. If you ask the experts what is a good bounce rate, you will get a range of numbers that sounds like they are playing Bingo. If you visit Quora to look for answers, majority of them say around 50%. If you visit SEOMOZ, majority of them say 25%. What is surprising though is no one questions why bounce rate exists, and what tools you can use besides Google Analytics to optimize it.
Let me put this in real world perspective, if you go to a gas station to fill up your tank, and you pay the gas station attendant named Mike, $100. A few minutes later Mike comes back to you and gives you a receipt, and on the receipt it says that you received $75 worth of gas but you were charged $100. Arent you going to be upset and question why did you pay $100 for $75 of gasoline? Well if, you ask Mike why, he will just tell you, Well this always happens at gas stations, this is normal. This is exactly what is happening when you buy traffic from Google Adwords, you pay them $100, and they send you $75 worth of traffic and then tell you the other $25 was bounced. In my opinion bounced is a buzz word that means you just got ripped off. Using Threat and Engagement analytics you can lower the bounce rate to 0%, and take matters into your own hands. Let me explain how.
Many bounced visitors are bots that were programmed to browse the internet like humans. In other words to your analytics they look like real human visitors, but in reality they are not. There are many reasons why they exist, clickfraud, scraping, analysis, data mining, hacking, spamming, DDOS attacking, etc. Its easy to launch one nowadays, we at Shopping Cart Elite take a proactive role in blocking them out from our network. We block hundreds of rogue bots every week. Many of them are hosted on Amazons cloud, so unless you look for it, they usually try to fit in with the rest of your traffic. Once the bots are turned loose, they will browse the internet 24/7/365 days per year. They waste advertisers budgets, waste server resources and populate analytic reports with garbage data.
For nine years now, I have witnessed this problem spin out of control and no one has developed a solution for it. Every SEO guru, PPC Expert and even Google has to date ignored this core problem, and brainwashed webmasters worldwide into believing that a high bounce rate is a normal thing to have on your website.
My name is Igor Soshkin, CEO of Shopping Cart Elite, and I have been frustrated with the experience of paying for Pay Per Click without knowing what you are actually paying for. In 2012, we had a meeting about investing $50,000 per month in our own advertising budget with PPC. At that meeting, we concluded that no one would be able to sleep at night, knowing that Google has access to the companys bank account to do whatever they please without any justification except for the numbers they claim to be accurate.
The only company we found that can provide a true traffic quality management solution is Google, and unfortunately Google is keeping the technology behind closed doors. Even if Google had it available, they would still be missing the engagement analytics. So weve decided to create our own traffic quality management solution for our customers. Weve created hundreds of algorithms to detect human like bots and other online threats. For example if we see mouse movement from a visitor who is using a desktop computer, but it doesnt look like his using the mouse to scroll because it is jumping all over the screen, we call that a bot. We store over 10 million offender IP addresses, we look at IP groups and IP history each month between all of our clients to come up with our threat score.
Weve also created hundreds of traps on the website that effectively generates visitor engagement score. For example if a visitor engages with the product image, product description or product price, we track that. If a visitor browses the search results for three minutes and then leaves without ever going to the product page, we track that as well. We analyze visitor behavior, and we can predict future visitor behavior trends. Depending on hundreds of different factors, we then recommend the webmaster to keep, optimize or drop certain keywords and campaigns based on the future trends.
SEE THREATS DASHBOARD SCREEN SHOT
You will notice that the bounce rate is only 8% for real visitors and 46% for fake visitors. If we were to combine the two bounce rates together, we would have a 21% bounce rate. Even though, SEOmoz was not totally wrong about 25% bounce rate being the average, the core problem is still there because the bounce rate exists, and you still pay for bounced traffic when you advertise with PPC. Using our solution you can see the true bounce rate for real visitors, and you can work on improving it and get it to 0%. Why would you care for even counting fake visitors? Why would you want to see anything other than real page views, and real visitor time on site? Fake visitors should not even be counted when evaluating your traffic.
SEE ROI DASHBOARD SCREEN SHOT
Using the R.O.I tool you will have a 360 degree view of your advertising campaigns performance. It shows your real visitors, engagement quality, sales and conversions. The R.O.I tool can even track phone sales and link them back to an advertising campaign like Google Adwords, a feature that Google Adwords doesnt offer to their customers.
SEE ROI KEYWORDS SCREEN SHOT
Using the R.O.I tool you can break down by keyword, referrer, creative ad, and a dozen of other filters to pin point exactly what you need to optimize. Finally, the R.O.I tool will recommend what keywords you should keep, optimize or drop for every advertising campaign.
SEE THREAT ANALYTICS SCREEN SHOT
You can research each visitor down to the page view. For example if you have a keyword that is sending you fake traffic and you want to verify the details, you can see the threat score, threat reason for each visitor, and take action to optimize your campaign accordingly.
SEE ENGAGEMENT ANALYTICS SCREEN SHOT
The same way you analyze fake traffic, you can also analyze real high engaging traffic. We provide engagement score, engagement reasons and reoccurring trends for each visitor. If you never optimized for engagement, it is common to see real high engaging visitors not converting into sales. To optimize this, weve created an issues column that will specify why a certain visitor did not convert. You can then sort by how many times the issues appear, and see if there is a reoccurring trend throughout your campaign. For example, if you constantly have a Product Selection issue, that means that customers are not finding anything they are interested on your website, and you should take action to either add those items, or get more targeted traffic.
SEE VISITOR BEHAVIOR SCREEN SHOT
If you will want to go even deeper, we render a screen shot of every visitors page view. On that screen shot, we re-create the mouse movement and behavior of the visitor. You can then analyze every screen shot of that visitor to understand what they did on your website.
You can only imagine that there are hundreds of scenarios on why a visitor didnt convert into a sale. All the analytic tools on the market today take this BIG DATA, and show you a BIG PICTURE. But there is a problem with that because when it comes to optimizing your campaigns, you end up using your gut feeling to make your decisions instead of logic with proven facts. Any SEO expert can tell you otherwise, but you have to realize that it is physically impossible for a human being to analyze this much data in real time, and identify the problem on your website that is hurting your conversions. Following a random set of best practices to improve conversion does not justify a logical approach to solving this problem. However, using Threat and Engagement analytics with industry best practices does make it logical.
I have personally managed 12 campaigns last quarter using this Threat and Engagement analytics, and I was able to cut over 50% of the PPC budget for my clients without affecting their sales. On average I saved each client about $8,500 per month or $100,000 per year that would have been wasted.
This tool is a game changer for companies that do Search Engine Marketing in-house, and for early adaptor advertising agencies that are looking to improve their clients campaigns by using innovative game changing technology.
Threat and Engagement Analytics will change the way ecommerce businesses advertise online. It is available to all Shopping Cart Elite clients regardless of your advertising budget, and we also made it available to third parties who spend $30,000 per month or more in pay per click marketing.