When are Bounce Rate, PPV and Time-on-Site Useful Metrics

You are here:

Home
SEO
When are Bounce Rate, PPV and Time-on-Site Useful Metrics

02/07/2018SEOBy Voova Digital

When would you use metrics such as time on site, pages per visit and bounce to give you effective feedback on your site? There has been much recent debate if these kind of metrics are truly valuable.

Perhaps there is enough doubt in your mind that you feel that you need further clarification on this issue. Voova Digital are the professionals of SEO, and our team of experts are at hand to give you exactly the right information to help you make a more valid judgement on the issue.

There are two schools of thought that are on opposite poles of the benefits of using the above metrics, some SEO experts say don’t pay any attention to such data but some digital marketing gurus pontificate how relevant this information is. Usually with such a contentious issue, the middle ground is quite often the truth.

When Aren’t Metrics Useful

Some site owners look at metrics such as pages per visit, time on site, and bounce rate as representations of success. Not as they should really be looking at which are conversion actions.

These type of actions is what you designed the architecture of the site to encourage visitors to do. So they may have completed a form, bought a product or left their contact details.

Sometimes these metrics are used as a comparison to sites that are not truly competitive. An example may be if you are comparing your product based site to that of say a media site.

Using a metric like time-on-site is also misleading because the media site may be news and content focused and therefore visitors would naturally spend longer. Large sites like Amazon don’t want dithering visitors, they want people to get to the relevant page and buy quickly.

Finally where the visitor found your site is really important, if it was on a link in Facebook on mobile then bounce rate will be high. But if it came from a Google search on an organic listing you will probably see the reverse.

When Metrics Are Useful

Metrics can be really meaningful if they are used for say diagnostics for the conversion funnel. You can use them to see where visitors came to your site, perhaps straight through the homepage or perhaps via a blog.

If you use metrics for this sort of information, then you can make significant changes to the site. Information such as whether time on site had reduced will also be highlighted.

Metrics are also useful if they are compared over a long time period, to see if external forces are responsible for negative changes or perhaps you have made internal alterations that are the cause.

Finally metrics can be really useful to benchmark your site against legitimate competitor sites. Perhaps a competitor’s site has a similar look and focus to your site, it can then be held up as a comparison and to see what areas are successful and which are not.

These pros and cons reasons show just why this topic is a hot conversational potato. Many different uses come to the fore that make these sort of metrics valuable or not. There are some great ways to use some of these type of metrics to add value to your site, and you should not simply discard them.