Attention Span: Bounce Rate & Pages Per Visit Plugin For Mint
Why Use Mint For Analytics
I use Mint to track stats on MacTips. Mint in itself is not that amazing. It provides pretty good stats, but nothing above and beyond what anybody else is offering.
What did draw me to Mint is the ability to create plug-ins. This is the deal maker for me and many others. There’s tons of standard and 3rd party plug-ins available that take Mint to the next level.
I needed a plugin for Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit but one didn’t exist–so I made one and I’m releasing it here (and on the Mint site once I test more).
Introducing Attention Span
Attention Span shows you how “sticky” your content is by displaying the Bounce Rate and Pages Per Visit.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who left your site after 1 pageview. The lower this number is the better.
Pages Per Visit: The average number of pages a user visits in 1 session. The higher this number is the better.
This is very useful for determining trends and content/design effectiveness.
What Did I Learn?
So, what have I learned from this plug-in so far?
I’ve learned MacTips is in a downward trend for effectiveness.
In the past month the Bounce Rate has gone up and Pages Per Visit has gone down.
As you can see the bounce rate has gone up to 40% in the past month. This isn’t great news, but at least I know now and can do something about it.
I’d guess the reason for this is either me placing more ads on the site or me cramming more information into the pages.
Either way, I realize there’s a problem now and I can actually do something about it. This is what Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit stats tell me.
Without this information I may have never realized my effectiveness was going down, especially considering my visitors were going up.
So your bounce rate is lower for a user like me, but MacTips also has the presence and familiarity that guarantees it'll be the first place I check for a tip.
Tech sites it seems would have a base of hardcore readers at the start who are more likely to spend time poring through page after page. But wouldn't a bigger or more popular site attract general users who just aren't as invested? Is a drop in effectiveness inevitable?
But what do I know, just curious for your thoughts! Cool little gadget you've made.
To a certain extent, yes--reference sites will inevitably have a higher bounce rate because users visit for the info they want, then leave.
Google--I'd imagine has a horrible bounce rate, but that's actually Google's goal--to get users off their site as quick as possible.
Let's say somebody searches for "ipod rating" and finds MacTips. It's great that they find the page they're looking for--but if I can show additional relevant links to other pages--and they click, this is very good for me because I'm essentially converting a visitor into a user.
The more users I do this with, the quicker the site grows and the bigger the dedicated user base gets.
Also, more pageviews = more ad revenue, which isn't a primary goal here--but doesn't hurt.
Bounce rate lets you know a lot of things about your website, but can vary drastically from website to website.
The people probably did not stick around after they had read what they wanted to see
That could very well be, sites that send a lot of traffic (Digg/Reddit/Lifehacker/etc..) generally do have a lower bounce rate than other sites.
The other thing I attribute it to is me moving the ads around on the page. I've made some adjustments since then and I've seen the bounce rate steadily go down.