Website Dropoff rates

[bethany]

How do you know when your website is performing well in this regard? What percentages are considered good vs. bad? Our site has a 75% drop off rate. How does this compare to everyone else's?

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[Charley Mann]

Are you talking about your bounce rate?  Ours comes in between 69-70%, though that's just the general bounce, which includes things like news postings, which often have higher bounce rates, and indexed PDFs, which can be found via search and also have high bounce rates, since they are singular documents.

[bethany]

Well not exactly. As I understand it, bounce rates apply to people who only visit one page of your site under a certain amount of time, whereas dropoff rates apply to people who visit more than one page of the site and then leave. I've mostly seen it in the visitor flow in Google Analytics. I attached a picture to illustrate what I'm referring to. Basically, I want to assess how "deep" into our site visitors should be going. It may be that our "dropoff rates" are normal for an attorney site since it isn't really expected that very many people would be exploring in more depth. Whereas in the example below, sites like bridal flowers and entertainment sites might be more likely to have visitors stay on their site for hours exploring the content. If I could compare our results with those of other lawyer sites, I would be able to better analyze whether our site is performing as expected or underperforming.

 

 

[emily]

Bethany,

What time period are you looking at? And are you just looking at the home page? I can tell you that for the past month, our drop-off rate for the home page is 51.7% For the month prior, it was 49.8%.  I can't tell you what is good for a lawyer website, but we can all compare ours to see how we're doing. (google analytics > audience > visitors flow)

[Charley Mann]

I'm not sure what would define a good dropoff rate either, but ours, for the home page only, comes in between 55-60%.  I could chat with the Foster Web folks (I'm going to be in their offices tomorrow) about the rate.

I like Emily's idea of comparing - and then of course helping people fix theirs if it seems unusually high!

[Kasey Richardson]

So I went into our Google Analytics so that I could share our numbers with the group and better participate in the discussion, and I found something very interesting. Drop-off rates are going to look different depending on where you are pulling the data from -- whether it is from Visitor Flow or Content Overview report (see below for details)...

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 27 - Feb 26, 2013: Drop-off = 43.9%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 26, 2013: Drop-off = 45.9%
• Nov 27 - Dec 26, 2012: 52.0%

Analytics> Standard Reports> Content> Overview {Page = / (homepage)}

• Jan 27 - Feb 26, 2013: Drop-off (Exit Rate) = 29.07%; Bounce Rate = 37.5%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 26, 2013: Drop-off (Exit Rate) = 35.84%; Bounce Rate = 40.66%
• Nov 27 - Dec 26, 2012: Drop-off (Exit Rate) = 26.25%; Bounce Rate = 42.48% 
  

Now, the reason I have noted the bounce rates from the "page overview" report is that the exit rate on that report is taking into account ALL visits to that page, regardless of whether the visitor started on that page (i.e. the homepage was essentially their landing page) or if they came to the homepage after landing (entering our website) on a different page. The "visitor flow" report shows you where people went when they landed on your site, so when you are looking at the homepage in the left most column, the homepage is the landing page (starting point) for all of those visitors. 

What I am a bit unclear on, however, is why the drop off rate for the homepage on the "visitor flow" report doesn't match the bounce rate on the "overview" report for the homepage. 

[Kasey Richardson]

A few definitions from Google Analytics (which helped to form my understanding as outlined above):

1. Bounce Rate -- percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page)
2. % Exit -- percentage of site exits that occurred from a specified page or set of pages
3. Entrances -- number of times visitors entered your site through a specified page or set of pages

On a slightly different note, Charley (& everyone else) -- do you know if it's possible to place tags on the reply messages, or can only the person who starts the thread apply tags? I am asking because it seems like this thread should have "Google Analytics" as a tag! 

[Charley Mann]

I've always had questions about what Bounce Rate actually is, since there are a few different parameters I've seen floated around the web regarding Time On Page and "Interactions."

Exit Rate in the Visitors Flow seems to be the hard number (came in to the page and left from it), while Bounce Rate may be more enigmatic.

Here's a really helpful article: http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2012/06/google-analytics-bounce-rate-demystified.html

[Kasey Richardson]

Interesting article -- although I thought some of the linked articles were a bit more straightforward and helpful. Also, if any of you haven't seen Avinash Kaushik's blog, "Occam's Razor" (and are interested in understanding more about Google Analytics) I would suggest checking it out: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ .... I don't make it back there to read stuff as often as I'd like, but what I have read has been very informative. 

Back to the original topic regarding exit rates -- where we you guys pulling your numbers from? Which report did you use?

[emily]

Kasey, 

I pulled my numbers from visitors flow. So, mine are just the drop off rate there.

About the difference between the drop off rates for the homepage on the visitor flow report v. the overview report, I think it is based on the number of returning v. new visitors. The number of entrances for the homepage for my visitors flow was 694, whereas the number of entrances for the homepage in the overview report was 632. Like Charley says, the exit rate in the visitors flow does seem to be the hard number to go by. 

[bethany]

Thanks for all the feedback! So, I'm not sure what the time frame was on the original drop rates I was referring to (Tim was the one who looked at it), but he was looking at our drop-off percentage for all of our pages, not just the home page. I looked at our visitor flow from the last couple of months and came up with this:

All Starting Pages

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 80.20%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 78.98%
• Nov 26 - Dec 26, 2012: 79.11%

Home Page Only

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 56.1%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 60.3%
• Nov 26 - Dec 26, 2012: 55.6%

In terms of analyzing the overall dropoff percentage for the entire site, I would think we would want to look at all of the landing pages dropoffs.

But as far as analyzing home page dropoffs, based on the numbers everyone has posted so far, it looks like home page drop offs (when looking at the visitor flow) is an average of 51.9%.So, I guess if we're around this number, we're doing about average.

Could everyone else post your overall dropoff rates and then we can compare?

[emily]

Sounds like a good idea! 

All Starting Pages

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 79.66%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 81.74%
• Nov 26 - Dec 26, 2012: Drop-off = 86.54%

Home Page Only

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 51.9%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 49.4%
• Nov 26 - Dec 26, 2012: Drop-off =  87.3%***

***This number appears to be an outlier. October, September, and August all had Drop-off rates in the low 50s. 

[Kasey Richardson]

How is everyone pulling drop-off rates for ALL pages? When I go to visitor flow I only see the rates for each individual page...

[Kasey Richardson]

O.K.. I manually calculated the rates for all starting pages, and came out with the following:

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow (HOMEPAGE ONLY)

• Jan 27 - Feb 26, 2013: Drop-off = 43.9%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 26, 2013: Drop-off = 45.9%
• Nov 27 - Dec 26, 2012: 52.0%

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow (ALL PAGES)

• Jan 29- Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 74.83%
• Dec 29, 2012 - Jan 28, 2013: Drop-off = 78.62%
• Nov 29 - Dec 28, 2012: Drop-off = 79.75% 

[Charley Mann]

All Starting Pages

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 77.3%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 78.65%

Home Page Only

Analytics> Standard Reports> Audience> Visitor Flow

• Jan 28 - Feb 28, 2013: Drop-off = 60.1%
• Dec 27, 2012 - Jan 27, 2013: Drop-off = 63.4%

I'd provide November, but during the entire autumn season, we had an issue with traffic coming in from Asia (it looked like someone was buying traffic to try and bomb our site - Foster's team fought them off for us, but it took some time, because they were putting a lot of effort in what they were doing).

[bethany]

Alright, so it looks like we are all averaging the same percent for all of our landing pages: somewhere between 70-80%. This at least tells us that our numbers are "normal" (for our group at least). Whether this is "good" or not is another story. Thanks everyone for your info. This is really useful.