To tar­get under­score blank or not – the bounce effect?

Posted on | January 28, 2010 | 3 Comments

Now this head­ing may seem a lit­tle con­fus­ing or make no sense at all. I will explain what this is all about. In web ana­lyt­ics we have a mea­sure­ment called bounce rate which is an impor­tant mea­sure­ment to deter­mine the qual­ity of the traf­fic to your site. Bounce rate mea­sures the num­ber of peo­ple who come to your site and leave from the same page they entered with­out click­ing on further.

My dilema is all about open­ing links in a new tab/window or not. Firstly for user expe­ri­ence and sec­ondly for bounce rates.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Avinash Kaushik states:

My own per­sonal obser­va­tion is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, any­thing over 35% is cause for con­cern, 50% (above) is wor­ry­ing. I stress that this is my per­sonal analy­sis based on my expe­ri­ence, but hope­fully it gives you a feel for what you are shoot­ing for.

Now this really depends on the type of site that you are run­ning and what you are try­ing to achieve. The stan­dard bounce rate for a blog is appar­ently between 50% to 75%. For exam­ple a blog­ger with a loyal fol­low­ing who stays on the blog for 4 or 5 min­utes to read the entire lat­est post and then leaves with­out click­ing to another page, because they have read it before, is still achiev­ing their goals. And yet they may have a bounce rate higher than the stan­dard range.

I have been try­ing dif­fer­ent meth­ods to reduce my bounce rate, which is com­fort­ably in the stan­dard range and occa­sion­ally goes below. There is one method that I really can’t decide on which direc­tion to take.

When you have a link in your post to another web­site you can add target=“_blank” to make that link open in a new tab and pre­vent peo­ple bounc­ing off your site. I have researched this quite a bit and fail to find con­sen­sus on this. Some SEO peo­ple will tell you to do this, as bounce rate affects your Google rank­ings, and there­fore, you need to force it. Oth­ers tell you this is anti­quated, and that most peo­ple know how to right click a link if they want to open in it in another win­dow instead of leav­ing your page, and you are treat­ing them like idiots by forc­ing this.

I have tried both meth­ods, but recently have tended to not use the tar­get under­score, feel­ing per­haps it is a bit anti­quated. Though every odd arti­cle I do add it just for test­ing. I am not 100% sure of this deci­sion and won­der if I am mak­ing a blun­der. My bounce rate has remained healthy, but could it be better?

I would be inter­ested to hear oth­ers views on this lit­tle method and it’s effect on bounce rate.

Sub­scribe to Lee-Ann’s newslet­ter

For more infor­ma­tion to hire Lee-Ann as a mar­ket­ing coach, for work­shops, talks, writ­ing or any of her other ser­vices visit the ser­vices page.

  • Share/Bookmark

No related posts.

Category: Web and more
Tags: > >

Comments

3 Responses to “To tar­get under­score blank or not – the bounce effect?”

  1. Brian Meeks
    January 29th, 2010 @ 9:50 pm

    I am new to blog­ging. I had heard a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of bounce. I thought it was peo­ple who went to your site and imme­di­ately left. If peo­ple stayed and read the arti­cle, they didn’t reg­is­ter as bounced. Per­haps I am wrong.

    I am also curi­ous whey you have a link to a blub, then we have to click on another link, to get the whole arti­cle. I have seen this before. Is this to improve bounce rate?

    I have only been at this for 27 days, so I am still learning.

    Brian Meeks
    http://extremelyaverageone.blogspot.com/

  2. Lee
    January 30th, 2010 @ 11:20 am

    Hi Brian, when mea­sur­ing bounce there is a max 30 minute ses­sion limit (or so I have read about Google ana­lyt­ics) before you have bounced. In other words if you do not leave the site by typ­ing another url, click­ing a link to an exter­nal site that opens in the same win­dow or push­ing the back but­ton and leav­ing the site within 30 min­utes and you have not left the page you are on you will be reg­is­tered as a bounce.

    Now there is a pos­si­bil­ity that this is mea­sured dif­fer­ently by dif­fer­ent tools — I am not sure.

    I am not 100% sure what you mean. If you mean why I have a link to an arti­cle about a prob­lem I have (blub) and it only shows as a sum­mary on the front page and you have to click to read the full arti­cle; there are a num­ber of rea­sons. I am going to assume this is what you mean and explain it.

    First rea­son is that I have a few posts on my home page and I have tested putting the full arti­cles up and also tested expand­ing them on front page and it just makes the home page too long. Also seems peo­ple don’t tend to read the full arti­cle — I think so much writ­ing is overwhelming.

    Sec­ond rea­son is that I pro­vide links to other rel­e­vant arti­cles which do not show on the home page, but on the arti­cle page.

    Third rea­son is that it reduces your bounce rate in Google ana­lyt­ics, which effects your rankings.

    Fourth rea­son that I link to home page in Linkedin instead of arti­cle page, is that the post url is too long and a few groups are not accept­ing tiny urls due to risk of mal­ice software.

    I have done quite a lot of test­ing of dif­fer­ent ways and have found this works best.

    If there was a more secure way of cre­at­ing tiny urls I would cer­tainly use them.

    And lastly why do I link to a blub: it is so that peo­ple can fully under­stand my dilemma with­out a word lim­ited. This arti­cle is really about try­ing to get views on this as I like to make deci­sions look­ing at things from a 360 degree view.

    I hope this helps you to under­stand the meth­ods to my mad­ness. :D

  3. Lee
    February 4th, 2010 @ 12:15 pm

    Just an update: I found a pretty cool plu­gin called pretty Links that cre­ates shorter urls using your own domain. So it seems I can go back to pro­vid­ing the page link rather than the home page! :D

Leave a Reply





Subscribe without commenting

  • Sub­scribe to my Newletter

    Would you like to hear some extra use­ful infor­ma­tion that I don’t put in my posts, read some of my lessons learnt through life, ben­e­fit from advice I have given to oth­ers or just keep up to date with my blog? If your answer is YES then SUBSCRIBE to my free newslet­ter.

  • Fill in your details here:

    powered by MailChimp!

  • Aqua Peb­ble Feed

    Aqua Pebble

    ↑ Grab this Head­line Animator

  • Aqua Peb­ble Twitter

    • Only Marketing Jobs: Marketing Blog 7 days ago March 3, 2010
    • Okay, following done! Followed all my Linkedin contacts who are active on Twitter. Also surprised how many people didn't have twitter. #in 9 days ago March 1, 2010
    • I can't believe how many of my Linkedin connections I am NOT following on Twitter - changing that right now! #in 9 days ago March 1, 2010
    • A guest post I wrote for Gossamar, specialists in sales and marketing automation: Pre-planning your website 9 days ago March 1, 2010
    • Aqua Pebble Newsletter - 12 days ago February 26, 2010

  • Great Blogs and Sites

  • LinkedIn

    If you want to see my LinkedIn profile, click on this button:

    Lee

  • UK Mar­ket­ing Network


    Visit UK Mar­ket­ing Network
    • Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes