What's your dealership website bounce rate?

[ed.brooks]

@Ed Brooks what do you think contributes to those numbers? There are a ton of variable involved, as @Alex Snyder points out. I honestly didn't expect to see Truecar on the bottom. Also - what's the most important metric here?

@Jeff Kershner The Alexa numbers are fun, but I'm sure they are not 100% accurate. Our internal numbers tell a more complete picture with homepage bounce setting a record low in October and, more importantly, delivering a double digit increase in leads to our dealers. The team in Chicago is delivering a pace of innovation -- or more accurately -- a pace of evolution that I've never seen at any company I've been involved with.

As to which is the most important metric? I'm a big believer in taking a holistic look at the big picture, so there is probably no single metric that is MOST important (other than cars sold and dollars of profit produced). It may boil down to the intent of the site; if the intent is to help the consumer research and make a decision on what to buy, what to spend, and who to buy it from, then the combination of Time on Site and Pageviews is really key - you're looking at engagement.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Does Google REALLY Use Dwell Time? Yup!
https://backlinko.com/google-rankbrain-seo

Obviously, the longer someone spends on your page, the better. This tells Google: “Man, people are LOVING this result. Let’s bump it up a few spots”.

And if someone bounces from your site after 2 seconds, that tells Google: “This result stinks! Let’s drop it down a few spots”.

So it’s logical that RankBrain would measure Dwell Time — and shuffle the results around based on this signal.

In fact, a Google employee recently said that Google used to rely 100% on off-page signals (especially backlinks). Even though Google still uses backlinks, this employee pointed out that:

 

[Alex Snyder]

how much does bounce rate matter? Obviously the less than 5 seconds bounces are bad, but is it as viable a stat as it once was?

Yes, much of this is debated in this thread already. But revisiting it isn't a bad thing. Plus it is being brought up in a conversation about Wordpress sites.

 

[AWNick]

It depends a lot on the traffic medium. I find bounce rate to be a great way to measure the effectiveness of PPC providers. We've seen some shockingly high bounce rates on client sites from PPC due to providers buying ridiculous keywords and sending them to unrelated pages. Keep an eye out for that.

 

[craigh]

It depends a lot on the traffic medium. I find bounce rate to be a great way to measure the effectiveness of PPC providers. We've seen some shockingly high bounce rates on client sites from PPC due to providers buying ridiculous keywords and sending them to unrelated pages. Keep an eye out for that.

Also keep an eye out for absolutely fantastic PPC campaigns that are so accurate that the customer only needs to visit 1 page before they leave.
If you're sending traffic to a specific vehicle or an event page, maybe you don't want them to do anything other than read and bounce off.
If your constantly learning, artificially intelligent, blockchain powered third party advertising company is really good, a high bounce rate could be appropriate.

That said, it's usually a bad sign.

 

[joe.pistell]

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[Alexander Lau]

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Lovely, previously I've posted that group here and have expressed the potential business model. Get refunded dollars for dealers at a %.

 

[GerryFoster]

In terms of how I study the engagement dance on our websites, one of the first things I like to look at is the VDP stats by traffic source / medium. We are able to quickly do this with a custom Google Data Studio report we built.

Don't be offended...I am totally going to steal this as a template for great KPI