Conversion rate and bounce rate – are they good metrics?

I often talk about conversion rate (or conversion frequency, as Google Analytics calls it), but it’s not always easy to draw conclusions from the number. The same goes for bounce rate. These figures can be skewed for a variety of reasons.

A good example of how things can become a bit counterintuitive is when you’ve carried out really effective SEO on your site – it might actually cause your conversion rate to drop. Sound wrong? The explanation is quite simple. The conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors who register, purchase, or do whatever it is you want them to do. If your SEO strengthens the entire site and turns it into an authority, you’ll start to show up in search results for all kinds of topics – all your pages start ranking.

Take this very site you’re visiting now, for instance – it ranks well for anything related to the six-hour workday (since we practice it and have written about it). For example, we’re ranked fifth for the keyword “Workday” in Swedish (Arbetsdag). Naturally, it’s not a bad thing that people can find us when they search for “workday”, but it’s not exactly a high-converting keyword. If your site becomes an authority, it will rank for non-converting terms. So it’s not strange at all if your conversion rate drops as your organic traffic increases. Compare it to switching from exact match to broad match in Adwords – not a perfect analogy, but still relevant.

The same logic applies to bounce rate. Just like with conversion rates, you can work on each traffic-driving page to improve conversions (and that’s absolutely worth doing), but as more traffic comes in, more such pages emerge – and this doesn’t improve the metric by itself. Bounce rate can be high for two main reasons: either the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for, or they found exactly what they were looking for.

You’re a good example. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you came here just to read this post. Maybe you found it through Twitter, Facebook, or another source. After reading it – regardless of whether you liked it or not – you’re likely to move on to something else, possibly on another site. If you’re already familiar with us, you probably won’t even click “About us” to see who wrote this. You have no need to visit more pages.

In that case, the bounce rate increases. Anyone who views only one page contributes to a bounce, and the reasons for this can vary widely – you could be really satisfied or completely disappointed.

Are they bad metrics, then?

Neither conversion rate nor bounce rate are bad metrics – they’re actually very useful. Use them to identify your lowest-converting pages and work on improving those. Find the pages users don’t like and fix them. But remember: the metric alone isn’t always a direct indicator of whether a page is good or bad – it must always be viewed in context.