What’s
going on here?
In the digital world, you constantly hear
people talking about bounce rates, and how advertisers strive for a low
percentage. Metrics such as session duration and time on page can provide
additional insight on bounce rate, and act as an indicator for your campaign’s
performance. As
important as the bounce rate is, it cannot tell the full story of your media
buys.
Depending on the platform you are using
(Google or Facebook), and the device your audience is seeing the ad on (mobile
or desktop), one metric will offer slightly different insights than the other.
Each metric has its benefit depending on how one is looking at the data. One
metric is better when viewing data based on device
category(desktop/mobile/tablet) and the other is better for comparing different
traffic sources.
Therefore, it is important to look at both, session duration and
time on page.
What
does it mean?
First, let's understand what bounce rate is.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from
the site after viewing only one page. Meaning if you have 5,000 monthly visits
to your website and 2,500 of those visits leave after only visiting one page,
you have a 50% bounce rate. Now you might be thinking, is that too high or too
low? Good or bad? In
order to answer those questions you need to consider other factors such as
session duration and time on page.
Time on page is the average amount of time a user spends on that one single page.
Session duration is how long a user spent on
your entire site in total [1].
If your audience is viewing ads via Facebook or Instagram, it’s
important to look at time on page. Mobile device users want to consume the
information they are looking for on one single page. They do not want to click on
multiple pages to find their answer or else they tend to bounce out; because of
this, mobile users are often counted as a high percentage bounce due to only
hitting one page.. In reality, they have already consumed all the information
they need.
Why
should I care?
Whether you are the client or a digital
marketer, it is important to understand the nuance of each metric and the story
they tell. Understanding what each metric means will help narrate the
performance of the campaign and will allow you to gather valuable insights to
keep your customers coming back.
Example:
Below is an example of a Google Analytics
report. We compared our Facebook buy to a Google search buy.
At first glance, we see there is an 86% bounce
rate compared to a 48% rate. However, if you look at the time on page, Facebook
is almost double the duration of Google. This is important because people are
spending time and taking actions on the page despite the low session duration,
whereas on Google people tend to spend more time on the website overall, rather
than on individual pages.. Broken down even further, you can see that your
average cost per retained visitor is cheaper for Facebook. This is a prime
example of how a bounce rate can be high, but still indicate a successful media
buy!