Brian is our VP of Strategic Services and he’s lately taken on the task of figuring out our site performance vis a vis page views other visitor metrics. Chief among them has been a bounce rate we’re not really happy about. Brian recently took a few articles on Helium and added some careful internal links. This is his analysis — and tips for writers.  -J.B.

 

To elaborate a bit on “bounce rate”, a “bounce” is when a visitor to the site arrives on a page and then leaves the site.  When you’re at the doctor’s office, pick up a magazine, read or glance at one page and then put it back down…that’s a “bounce” for that magazine.

 

A couple of online examples are…

 

1.            A user searches Google for “foot scrub”, a Helium article is in the search results, the person clicks on the search results and reads the article.  It is a one-page, helpful article.  Having read the article the person then leaves Helium to go about their business.  For this scenario the goal of our business is to display relevant or compelling content in a quality way, so that the user is intrigued enough to click on it.  When the reader makes that second click, our site has further opportunity to accomplish several things: Get them to click on more articles, learn more about the site, perhaps convert to a writer themselves, share the content with others, etc.

 

2.            Another example is that same user clicks on a search result and lands on an article on our site.  The difference in this example is that it is a two-page article, but for whatever reason it is not relevant to their search…similar to the example Erich R. referred to is where a user searching on “running motors” lands on an article about running shoes.

 

Article relevancy is only one of many factors that impact bounce rate, others being site performance, quality of the visual/brand experience, writing quality of the article, etc.

 

I’ve been doing analysis to determine how we might best reduce the bounce rates of our articles, looking at all aspects of it.  One of the common beliefs is that linking within articles to other areas on a site improves bounce rate.  That belief was held by some here but not all.  Thus when we saw intelligent people (imho) have differing opinions it was worth a serious analysis.   My goal was to see what real data had to say.

 

An important factor is that to have an impact to bounce rates, that link in the article would have to be to somewhere else on the site – if that link were to some off-site destination, that would be considered a bounce.  For example, a user lands on a Helium article from google, clicks a link within that goes to Wikipedia, and poof…that’s a “bounce”.

 

Another important factor is the balance of a variety of goals, bounce rate being merely one.  It’s no good to reduce bounce rate if that one click the user makes to some next Helium page is an unhelpful experience.  If so, then they quickly leave and your average-time-on-site and average-pages-per-view goes down.  You want those two metrics to be high because that means people are comfortable on your site and compelled to stay and roam, builds the brand, serves more ads, generates more revenue, offers more opportunity to educate them on the uniqueness of and opportunities at Helium.

 

On the other hand, if that second page is not just unhelpful, but a horrible experience, then you damage your brand and your number of visitors go down – making us all very sad.

 

For the test my goals were to have several links within the article on the first page, that the links were on credible words or phrases and that, if someone clicked on one of those links the resulting page was meaningful to both that word/phrase as well as the context of the article.  It took quite a bit of time to find the right articles with the right type of content where I could hand craft meaningful links in a way that maintained the quality of that article.  Every step of the way I kept the integrity of the article first and foremost, and applied links as if they were my own articles. My goal was to do something valuable for the article and the reader.

 

The result of this analysis was that, for these articles, we saw improvements on all three; bounce rates, average time on site and average pages per visit.  Some were marginal, some were dramatic and truthfully for some there was no effect.  The net result, though, was very positive.

 

As for not informing the writers first, my apologies to anyone having taken offense.  We operate in a time-is-of-the-essence mode daily here as we strive to build this world-changing wonder we call Helium.  In order to get a valid test, anyone in-the-know clicking on the article would have muddied the analysis data if they viewed the article.  I suspect it would have delayed the test upwards of a week if I had proceeded with finding the right articles written by writers interested in participating in the test and needing to collaborate on which phrases were best linked to what.  Though a week doesn’t sound very long, in a startup such as ours that’s an eternity.

 

I hope this helps shed some light on what it was we were doing, why we did it and how we approached it – and in general how we approach everything here.

 

bri

 

aka Brian VanKonynenburg

VP, Strategic Services

Helium.com