Dealing with High PPC Bounce Rates

For any business owners, their most sought after conversion point can’t be tracked. This can sometimes happen when a business is looking for phone calls. While, it is true, you can use a call tracking system but if one isn’t wanted you can turn to your bounce rate metric to make PPC optimization decisions.
By definition a bounce rate is:

Proportion of visitors to a web page or web site that exit after visiting a single web page only, which is usually expressed as a percentage.

PPC traffic can traditionally have a higher bounce rate than your site average, this isn’t always true but it does hold true more often than not.  If phone calls are your desired conversion and you normally expect traffic to browse your site before calling, then optimizing this metric can drastically help improve your phone calls.

So how do you do this?

I’m glad you asked.

Run a Google Analytics report showing your top 500 keywords from all “cpc” or paid sources of traffic.  Next, import this data into excel and hide all rows other than Bounce Rate and Keyword.  From this list you can compare it to your keywords in the various ad groups in your campaign.   Work your way through this list and make decisions to pause the terms based on this metric.  If you are seeing a lot of bounce rates from a handful of keywords then start with pausing these and evaluate your decisions in a week or two.

A Word of Caution.

Bounce rates can also be because of your landing page.  Before pausing anything, make sure this keyword is organized into the right campaign and ad group.  For example, if you are advertising on “salmon fishing” but landing the visitor on a page about “tuna canning”, then it makes sense they would bounce.