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What's your dealership website bounce rate?

benstewart

Full Sticker
May 18, 2014
14
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First Name
Ben
Hi all,

I've been lurking here and posted about best BDC practices recently.

I am also wondering what the average bounce rates among the members here? We are a GM dealer currently working with Cobalt/CDK and don't have much flexibility in regards to making changes. Our site currently takes about two clicks to get to a search page, be it from the top navigation bar or from a search bar located beneath. We also have a typed search bar that could land users on a page within one try.

Our bounce rate (through Google Analytics, with our work IP addresses filtered out) around 29-33% on the sales end with our used search page and "search all" page as leaders at 29-36%.

Is this normal by comparison? Thanks for any and all responses.
 
Morning Ben,

Consider adding "Shopper's Return Rate" to you most important measurements. In my 15yrs in the biz, this the signal of a satisfied shopper 'on the hunt' (& shopper is considering that your store is a finalist). It's important to watch and it's the hardest to improve.

HTH
Joe
 
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Sometime near the beginning of 2014 Google changed the definition of bounce rate. The common understanding of bounce rate is that if a visitor landed on a page and then left without viewing another page their visit would be considered a bounce. See image below of the bounce rate definition at the end of 2013 from Google:
Screen Shot 2016-05-25 at 10.39.41 AM.png

The definition changed in 2014 but many didn't notice. Check out the new definition below:

Screen Shot 2016-05-25 at 10.39.25 AM.png

Interesting right?

If someone "interacts" with the page it's not a bounce. What does interact mean? Interact means that if an event is fired which then hits GA servers the session is not considered a bounce regardless if the visitor viewed 1 page or 10 pages. So, theoretically, if event tracking is set up and is set-up to measure "click to call" this would prevent a bounce. This is assuming the visitor clicked the click to call icon/button. Even if a user visited one page on mobile and spent 5 seconds on the website this action would prevent a bounce..

This is pretty smart because Google analytics is measuring action. However, there is a ginormous flaw with this. You have to manually set up event tracking. Some dealers have it and some don't. To define a "normal" bounce, especially with more people using more mobile, is tough. It's tough because there is absolutely no industry standard. Some providers may have event tracking on every button while others have none. I have also seen providers count scrolling and page load as an event, effectively reducing the bounce rate to nearly 0%.

Until there is an industry standard and some true benchmarks, bounce rate is a pretty useless metric when comparing yourself against other dealers. Mixed 20 groups are a haven for erroneous data like this. However, once you have "events" that matter to YOU set up, it's a great metric to compare against yourself.

Here's a decent article from WooRank on this: http://blog.woorank.com/2014/08/why-your-google-analytics-bounce-rate-is-wrong/
 
Last edited:
32% is about average.

I pulled the stats across 20 dealership sites.

Worst across all pages 39% bounce rate...

Average across all pages at 27% bounce rate.... mostly due to direct VDP page views from Organic Search... Homepage around 20%, Inventory SRP around 18%.

Sites with best conversion... at 20% bounce rate. Homepage around 16%, Inventory SRP at 12%.

Also when looking at bounce rate try to Segment by Secondary Dimension of User > City.... as the PMA bounce rates are going to be much lower.
 
32% is about average.

I pulled the stats across 20 dealership sites.

Worst across all pages 39% bounce rate...

Average across all pages at 27% bounce rate.... mostly due to direct VDP page views from Organic Search... Homepage around 20%, Inventory SRP around 18%.

Sites with best conversion... at 20% bounce rate. Homepage around 16%, Inventory SRP at 12%.

Also when looking at bounce rate try to Segment by Secondary Dimension of User > City.... as the PMA bounce rates are going to be much lower.

He's alive! You're such the Lurker anymore. ;-)
 
Chris I like your idea but just so you know your images boxes are hyperlinking to your dealer inspire website. Maybe thats what you want but won't help your CDK analytics.

Seconded. How did this help your bounce rate?
I suppose since it's "Open in a new window" Google might track it as an event, but it seems counter intuitive.