Are These 2 Marketing Metrics Lying to You?

You need to understand how your campaigns are performing to get your desired win. But judging every campaign’s metrics the same way is a fool’s errand.

Here are a couple marketing metrics that might inadvertently be lying to you.

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1. A High Bounce Rate is Bad.

Not necessarily. But before I get into an explanation, let’s look at what a bounce rate is.
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single page sessions (the sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting).
Now that you understand what your bounce rate is, you need to understand how it is impacting your marketing. This is a little tricky. Having a high bounce rate can be both good or bad, according to what kind of lead your campaign is trying to get.
[box]Let’s look at it this way:
Most types of online leads – a white paper download, registration for a webinar, email newsletter signup, web form submission, and etc. – encourage a visitor to view multiple pages. If a prospect converts, this would result in a zero percent bounce rate. For a business whose only lead generation comes from their website, a high bounce rate is bad.
On the other hand, if your campaign is designed to generate phone call lead submission, then a high bounce rate is really unimportant. What is presumably happening is prospects are coming to your site or landing pages and converting. This would result in a very high bounce rate, but it means that your campaigns are successful. [/box]

Once you identify the types of leads your campaigns are designed to generate, you can properly evaluate what your bounce rate is saying about your campaign performance.

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2. High Average Pageviews Per Visit is good.

Again, not necessarily. Let’s define this metric first.
The average pageviews per visit metric is the total number of pageviews divided by the total number of visits during the same timeframe. This is the average number of pages that a visitor is navigating to each time they visit your site.
Now, while it may seem like having high average page view per visit is good, that isn’t always the case. Just like with bounce rate, it’s tricky. You need to look at the exact purpose of your site to determine whether or not you should expect a high or low average pageviews per visit.
If your marketing campaigns are designed to funnel prospects into submitting a web based lead, then a high number of pageviews per visit may be a good thing. Conversely, if you are marketing for phone call leads then a low number of pageviews per visit could be good, and not bad.
However, your pageviews per visit can indicate problems with your site:

• • It might be difficult for visitors to navigate your site. Therefore they have to navigate across multiple pages to get to the content they are wanting to access.
  • Your content may not follow best practices for writing for the web. If this is the case, visitors may leave your site.
  • If you aren’t targeting your audiences, then your visitors are less likely to view many pages on your site.

Unfortunately, it is easy to be misled by your analytics. If you are looking at your metrics incorrectly, you could be misinformed about your campaign performance. By having a complete understanding of what your metrics are saying, you will be empowered to make informed decisions to improve your campaigns.

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