I really do think it’s worth spending money on design.

-rsh

I really do think it’s worth spending money on design.

-rsh

I know both of these designers personally, so I felt comfortable turning this work over to people who know me, know my site, know what I’m about.

It was well worth the money. I’m so proud of what I send out as a business. It’s highly professional, and very unique as a real estate agent. My biz cards are not something that are going to embarrass people to hand out to their friends, and have immediate impact, and are expressive of a business experience- relaxed, professional, unique.

I know both of these designers personally, so I felt comfortable turning this work over to people who know me, know my site, know what I’m about.

It was well worth the money. I’m so proud of what I send out as a business. It’s highly professional, and very unique as a real estate agent. My biz cards are not something that are going to embarrass people to hand out to their friends, and have immediate impact, and are expressive of a business experience- relaxed, professional, unique.

Every indexed page on a site is a potential landing page, isn’t it?

The 46% number I reported earlier as a “site bounce rate” comes straight off Google Analytics. I log in, set a date range and under “site usage” it reports one number for bounce rate. Again, I don’t know how that’s calculated, but it appears to be an aggregated number for all pages hit in that time period.

I agree *completely* that an aggregated bounce rate means nothing. But that doesn’t stop people from asking “what’s your bounce rate?”

Every indexed page on a site is a potential landing page, isn’t it?

The 46% number I reported earlier as a “site bounce rate” comes straight off Google Analytics. I log in, set a date range and under “site usage” it reports one number for bounce rate. Again, I don’t know how that’s calculated, but it appears to be an aggregated number for all pages hit in that time period.

I agree *completely* that an aggregated bounce rate means nothing. But that doesn’t stop people from asking “what’s your bounce rate?”

With that said, we really never speak to overall bounce rate. We like to speak about the bounce rate of specific pages. We create a funnel, and adjust our site to move traffic through that funnel…

With that said, we really never speak to overall bounce rate. We like to speak about the bounce rate of specific pages. We create a funnel, and adjust our site to move traffic through that funnel…

The 46% average is just that, GA tracks the bounce rate of every individual page. It then reports an overall bounce rate for the site. To be honest, I don’t know how exactly it calculates it.

For example, if Page A is visited 2 times and has a 100% bounce rate and Page B is visited 500 times and has a 5% bounce rate, I *assume* GA takes 500 visits at 5% and 2 visits at 100% and returns an average. (Which in this extreme case would be very close to 5%). But I can’t say for sure this is how it determines the “Average”.

It’s really a rather meaningless number though.

Yes, the bounce rate… bounces around (sorry, couldn’t resist) a LOT. I have many pages in the 85% – 100% range. Doesn’t bother me one iota — as you say, someone came looking for info, found it, and left. And that’s OK. Some of those people will come back later for more info, some will say, “Hey, this site rocks!” and bookmark it, and a few will on occasion think “Might as well look at homes while I’m here”. I’m fine with any of those outcomes.

I do get a certain satisfaction though watching people who come to the site via a very specific search, find what they are looking for and then spend an hour or two looking (and I assume reading) post after post of content unrelated to what they originally stopped by for. I’m pretty sure those types just became a regular reader and will visit frequently, tell their pals, subscribe, link back, who knows — but it’s all good. Or better yet, if they are local, they may just decide some day to buy or sell a home… I’ve had clients that told me they read the blog for more than two years before they reached out for help buying/selling real estate. That’s pretty cool.

Incidentally, the “informational pages” with bounce rates in say the 60 – 80% range are almost always pages where there are multiple posts about the topic. For example, I’ve got several posts on the home buyer tax credit. People search, find one, and often go to another page on the same topic (here’s where internally linking to similar posts, or having some ‘Related Articles’ links helps people get further info). Conversely the info type posts that are stand alone have bounce rates approaching 100%.

As you mention, I would expect the BR on a search page to be low. People go there to search for homes. Back in the day when I had a lousy, very unfriendly IDX solution, the bounce rate was *significantly* higher then it is now. This tells me the Diverse Solutions product works. People come to search, and they search.