Which Analytical Report is Most Important: CTR or Bounce Rate? We Say: Both.

What is more important: An analytical report that tells you how many people are clicking through your website, or a report telling you how many people are leaving?

Sorry… why do we have to choose only one of those things? That’s like only being allowed to look one way before you cross the road. You really need both POVs to make a responsible decision here.

Both click-thru-rate (CTR) and bounce rate data are massively important to anyone, in any business, advertising anywhere on the internet. They are crucial metrics, whether you’re looking at a PPC campaign, a blog, or an e-commerce site.

These two metrics combine to tell you the whole story. And it’s definitely a story you need to hear.

Here’s why:

Learn From Both Your Successes and Your Failures

Let’s call your bounce rate your losses. These are the people who came to your site, saw what you have, and left without any interaction. That’s a loss. But CTR shows you the people who clicked around and showed an interest in you. That’s a win.

They say in life, you only learn from your losses. In digital marketing, that’s hogwash. Your wins tell you what you should be doing more of.

If you’ve got a page with a high CTR, you’ve got your audience’s attention. This is particularly good news for a blog page. You’ve likely captured the readers’ attention, so they want to look around and learn more about you.

So try to recreate this. This can be offering more of the same type of blog, maybe a different slant on the same topic. So if you’ve got a basketball blog and your blogs about Russell Westbrook have a high CTR, write more about Russell Westbrook.

However, if you’ve got a high bounce rate, people are arriving and leaving. That means you likely didn’t offer what they wanted or expected. Your analytical report is telling you that you need to fix things.

What a High Bounce Rate or Low Click-thru-rate Tells You

If people are leaving your site without any engagement, it’s one of three things (most likely):

• Unmet expectations
• No “next step”
• A bad user experience

Unmet Expectations

At the surface level, the user came to your site looking for something, didn’t find it and left.

This could be from a misleading title, or from “burying the lead.” Maybe you promised a blog that tells them how much a chiropractor costs, but you don’t answer the question. That’s a misleading title.

Or maybe you finally answered the question in the last 100 words of a 1000 word page. That’s burying the lead. Nobody is going to stick around to find what they want. They know they can find it somewhere else, much quicker than here.

So they bounce, and the proof is right there in your analytical report.

No “Next Step”

This one is the kiss of death. You have a great page, with concise images and copy. You’ve given them everything they need but not encouraged them to do anything else, or take the next step.

That next step is whatever your single goal is for this page. That goal may be:

• Book an appointment
• Sign up for our newsletter
• Read another blog
• Contact us
• Get a free quote
• Buy your product. Or start a free trial

This next step is what moves them through your sales funnel. So make sure it’s clear. Notice, above we said “single step.” One goal, one page. That’s the ratio. Don’t give your audience too many menu items or buttons to push.

That leads us to our next point…

A Bad User Experience

We could fill a 25 blog series with what constitutes a bad user experience. The list of things can go right is a lot shorter than what can go wrong.

Things that can go right:

1. They take the next step
   – End of list-

Things that can go wrong:

1. This page looks too different than the previous page, so the user thinks they’re in the wrong place
2. The page has too much going on, with too many buttons to push and too many links to click
3. The copy is boring or full of spelling errors
4. They’re now being asked for a credit card and don’t want to give it
5. The page is taking too long to load
6. The design is poor and the user is frustrated
7. The page has broken links or images
8. The headline is weak or misleading
9. Your form has too many fields to fill out
10. Your whole page has too much copy

You get the idea. We could list a lot more there. It’s basically anything that stands between your user and your sale funnel.

What Else Should I Be Looking For in My Analytical Report?

Try to stop looking at “vanity metrics” like Likes, Shares, Retweets or Followers. Because these numbers do not necessarily lead to revenue. You can have 200,000 followers, and no sales. And a lot of companies do.

Look at statistics that measure engagement, or how people are interacting (or not) with your content.

Take a close look at metrics like:

• Click-thru-rate
• Bounce rate
• Traffic Sources
• New/Unique Visitor Conversion
• Return Visitor Conversion
• Interactions Per Visit
• Value Per Visit
• Cost Per Conversion

Proper measurement is essential to the success of any digital marketing campaign. Without this information, you may pour more money where it’s never going to pay off, or you may kill off campaigns that just need some tweaks to start selling.

Never assume a campaign is a flop because it’s failing out of the gates. And never assume you really know why a campaign is succeeding, until you’ve seen the numbers.

We can help you analyze and monetize your traffic with an analytical report and detailed statistics. You can learn more by clicking here.