In my post last week I covered Three Common Questions on Bounce Rate. Measuring and understanding your bounce rate is very important, especially when it comes to paid traffic sources like PPC.

Why is PPC bounce rate so important?

1.Bounce rate is a measurement of how relevant your site is. If your PPC traffic is bouncing it means that visitors are not finding your site relevant. Unlike organic traffic, you are paying for those PPC visitors and therefore effectively wasting your media spend on traffic that does not stick around long enough to convert.

2.Google's Quality Score is related to the relevance of your landing page. If your bounce rate is high, Google will assume that your PPC traffic does not find your page relevant and will penalise you with a higher minimum bidding price on your AdWords campaigns.

Image via Flickr: Jelle Vermeiren (under CC)

How to reduce your PPC bounce rate:

Identify keywords with high bounce rates
The first step to improving your PPC bounce rate is to identify PPC keywords with high bounce rates. Only concern yourself with keywords that have driven a statistically significant number of visitors. I usually export a CSV from Google Analytics, open it in excel, sort my data by number of visits, and then delete the keywords with negligible visits. I then order my remaining keywords according to bounce rate to highlight those keywords that bring in a lot of traffic but also have a high bounce rate.

As I said last week, it’s difficult to say what constitutes a “high” bounce rate as it depends on a variety of factors. However, anything above 40% is a good place to start. If you are lucky (or skilled) enough to have all your PPC keywords below 40%, start on the next highest bounce rate and work your way down the list.

Investigate keywords with high bounce rate
There are a number of potential reasons for a keyword having a high bounce rate – it could be that your keywords are badly chosen, your advert is misleading or that your landing page is not relevant.  Ask yourself these questions to figure out where the problem lies:

1). Is the keyword highly relevant to your site?
Google the offending keyword yourself to see what search results are returned. Perhaps there are other meanings for that keyword that you were not aware of? Abbreviations and acronyms are particular culprits. If you find this is the case, try using matching options like phrase, exact and negative matching to decrease the likelyhood of your advert showing for the wrong audience.

2). Does the copy of your advert qualify your traffic?
Attracting as many people as possible with a clever or tempting ad might get you lots of clicks, but if it’s attracting the wrong type of traffic your bounce rate and Quality Score will suffer. Rather be upfront in your advert to make sure that it is 100% clear what site they will be taken to and what offer you are presenting. Get other people to read your advert to make sure there is no possible misunderstanding. Also be careful when using Dynamic Keyword Insertion as it can often result in adverts that are misleading.

3).Are you targeting the right place at the right time?
Geotargeting audiences in the US for a product that is only available in the UK will mean that US traffic is likely to bounce. Make sure you are geotargeting the right regions at the right times of day. Use Analytics to investigate bounce rates of different regions, and consider setting up different campaigns with different adverts and landing pages to target different audiences more accurately.

4). What position is your advert being shown in?
In my experience, having an advert in position 1 can often lead to “unwanted” clicks – people simply click on the first thing they see. Experiment with different advert positions to make sure that your audience is actually reading the copy before they click.

5). Is your landing page highly relevant?
Is the journey from keyword to advert to landing page logical and expected? You might think it makes perfect sense, but your traffic might think otherwise. Test some conversion optimisation tactics like using the keywords in your advert heading and landing page heading to ensure that there is no room for confusion. If you suspect the page is not relevant enough, change it, or build a new one for that particular keyword.

These questions should help you to identify why your PPC traffic is bouncing and hopefully fix the problem. Try out my suggestions on your PPC traffic and let me know how it goes.