If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, which is strongly recommended, then you should also have your Google Ads (AdWords) and your Google Analytics accounts linked. This is so important, you are after all using your hard earned cash to pay for these people to get to your site, you need to see what they get up to when they land. Waiting for the phone to ring or a ‘You’ve Got Mail’ type ping into your inbox is missing a trick. Without analysing the way people navigate your site you may be missing something really important.
What is a bounce rate?
One of the things to look at is Bounce Rate. This is a statistic that you find on the dashboard. Bounce rate means ‘this percentage of people have only looked at the page they landed on’ so with PPC, this percent of all your traffic have gone no further than your landing page. Of course they could call, but let’s assume they haven’t.
This factor is less important for PPC in a way than organic traffic because of course with PPC traffic you decide exactly where that traffic lands. If you had a really high bounce rate on your home page from organic traffic, that could indicate a problem – people aren’t moving from the gate post to find out more about your business and engage with you.
Relevancy and PPC
With PPC it’s more about relevancy. Say you are advertising to a certain demographic on Facebook such as females aged between 19-24. As an extreme example and potentially very stereotypical example, imagine directing this traffic to a website page all about carpentry tools. I would expect the bounce rate to be pretty high. Target people who work in construction and the bounce rate will be lower as that page is more relevant to their needs and interests. You need to ensure that your landing page is as relevant as possible to the source search and audience profile.
Another thing to consider is if the bounce rate is high on certain pages, look into it. Test things. Look at it very critically yourself. If you think they are calling you, place a different number on that page and see if that phone rings. Test landing pages. The great thing about PPC is that you can test things almost as soon as the page is ready, try different things and test. If the bounce rate improves, consider implementing these changes on your main site.
Either way, keep an eye on it. A high bounce rate, say over 60-70% may indicate a problem that you need to investigate and resolve.
