Internet Marketing Blog

What is bounce rate? It’s the percentage of people who enter your site and leave straight away. You can save thousands of pounds by looking at your Pay per Click bounce rates and pausing the under-performing keywords that have a high bounce rate.

If your Pay per Click ads are driving highly relevant traffic to your site you should have an average bounce rate of around 25%, if your bounce rate is higher than 40% you are driving the wrong traffic to your website and wasting your money and marketing budget.

Checking your bounce rate is very easy; your site will need Google Analytics in place with your Pay per Clicks tracked. It would be good to have goals setup with Google Analytics too to double check conversion rates with borderline performing keywords. Hopefully you will have been running Google Analytics for a few months so you can take a large date range to view a full set of results, which will give you the stats that you need to make a more informed decision.

Go to Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google > Paid (the Paid filter is in the main content area, just under the main traffic graph).

You will now see all the search terms listed by most visited. Take a look at the end column “Bounce Rate”; now sort the data by bounce rate, and there you have it - a list of keywords with high bounce rates. You can export this data into an excel spreadsheet and play around with it, removing all the low bounce rate term. You will soon be left with a detailed report on underperforming pay per click keywords with a high bounce rate.

Example of a bad bounce rate

We have taken a screenshot from Google Analytics of a Pay per Click campaign with a few bad performing keywords in. The 3 keywords highlighted shows that over 1,200 clicks have been paid for (that’s £600 at 50p a click). These keywords have a much higher bounce rate than the rest of the campaign; the highest being 72.32%. In addition the average page visits and time on site is much lower than the other keywords.

These 3 keywords are obviously worth pausing and looking into. There could be a combination of factors that are causing it; such as poorly targeted keyword, badly worded adverts or poor landing pages.

The average bounce rate of the campaign is 39.35%, page views per visit is 4.98, with the highest being 7.73 and time on site is 2.03 minutes. If we remove the 3 bad keywords it would have a positive impact on the campaign.

Example of a good bounce rate

Here is an example of a well tuned Pay per Click Campaign. The average bounce rate is 23.71%, page view per visit is 7.13 and time on site is 4.03 minutes. There are no underperforming keywords;

We’d recommend you pause all the high bounce rate keywords from your Pay per Click campaigns straight away, especially if they are driving a lot of traffic with few conversions. You can do a quick calculation on how much money you will save by multiplying the monthly visits by the average cost per click. If you stop 2,000 high bounce rate clicks per month at 50p each this will equate to a saving of £12,000 a year.

Every aspect of your internet marketing campaign and budget can be tracked for return on investment giving you clear understanding where your money is best spent and what campaigns are the most effective.

Each internet marketing campaign and traffic source such as Pay per Click Campaigns, Email Marketing and Natural search traffic can be broken down into minute detail.

Lead Generating ROI Reports

For a lead generation site, where the campaign purpose is to get people to fill in an enquiry form or apply online for a service, a return on investment report needs to produce the following information:

• Source - where the traffic came from – such as Google Pay per Click
• Campaign – which campaign generated the traffic – such as a Campaign within Google Pay per Click
• Traffic – the number of unique users the campaign has generated
• Campaign Cost – total cost of running each campaign
• Cost per click – the amount it has cost to get each user to the site
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of users that have reached the desired goal
• Conversions – total number of leads the campaign has generated
• Cost per Acquisition – the cost of each lead generated.
• Value of Conversion – this is the value of a lead to you. You need to set this to the average value a lead generates. I.E The amount of money it makes you. If you make 1 deal out of every 10 leads and the average deal value is £200 then the value of conversion will be £20.
• Return on Investment - the amount of money you make on your campaigns compared to the amount of money you spend on your campaigns.

Example Lead Generation ROI Report

We have produced the above report by collecting the following data:

• Source
• Campaign
• Traffic
• Campaign Cost
• Conversions
• Value of Conversion

Our spreadsheet works out the rest – (download the spreadsheet here).

eCommerce ROI Reports

For an eCommerce site you can track internet marketing ROI on orders produced. The data produced for an eCommerce ROI report will include

• Traffic – the number of unique users the campaign has generated
• Cost per click – the amount it has cost to get each user to the site
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of users that have reached the desired goal
• Orders – total number of orders the campaign has generated
• Cost per Acquisition – the cost of each order generated.
• Total Cost of Campaign – total cost of running each campaign
• Average Order Value – the average value order value produced by each campaign
• Total Sales – total value of sales generated by a campaign
• Return on Investment - the amount of money you make on your campaigns compared to the amount of money you spend on your campaigns.

Example eCommerce RIO Report

We have produced the above report by only collecting the following data:

• Source
• Campaign
• Traffic
• Campaign Cost
• Orders
• Total Sales

Our spreadsheet works out the rest – (download the spreadsheet here)- see sheet “Ecommerce ROI Report” in the spreadsheet - there are two sheets!!  Simply amend the info the columns listed above and the spreadsheet will work out the rest for you. How easy it that : )

What next?

You are now in complete control of your internet marketing budget - down to the last penny.  I’d suggest producing a new sheet each month and building up an archive of your activities. You will soon be able to see trends for each  internet marketing activity.

So you now know how to put a simple Internet Marketing ROI report together. All you need now is to collect the data for your report. In Part 2 of our Internet Marketing Return on Investment Tracking, we will put together a guide on how to collect the data  needed in the report and track your campaigns.

Having an all singing all dancing website is great, but the most important factor in having a successful website is that people can use it and easily find what they are looking for.

We recently worked with a company who we ran a test PPC campaign for. The campaign was very successful in that it attracted a lot of new visitors to the site, but it seemed that after the user got to the site they either had a quick look around or simply dropped out of the site all together.

The problem, in short, was with the site navigation and the fact that the enquiry process, which is what the client wanted visitors to the site to engage with, was hidden away and quite time consuming to complete. In addition the site was quite cluttered and untidy, with an array of unrelated adverts, which only worked to distract instead of enhance the visitor’s enjoyment of the site.

When you design a website think about what you want the user to do; be it place an order, make an enquiry or buy a product and make those things accessible. You should also consider the navigation and make sure that it is clear and actually aids the user in their navigation of your site. Pages that are buried don’t get read, so if it is important then make sure it can be found. You might think that something is straight forward but this doesn’t mean that everyone else will too. Ask a colleague or a friend for their thoughts. You know what they say, ‘two heads are better than one’.