Wacdesigns | Technology, Web 2.0 and Life

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

Definition: A bounce occurs when a person leaves your website after reaching your entry page. The above cases can be considered equally as bounces from your website.

1) Visitor enters your site and press back immediately (before or even after the page has loaded)

2) Visitor waits for the page to load stays on this page for some time and then press back or navigate on another site. ( In this case the visitor might have found the information and then chose to navigate elsewhere to either find some supplementary information. Or it could be that he/she might not have found it but just read some pieces to see what is there, a third case could be the persons did not like the: website, content or colors on the site and went away.)

Therefore there seems to be considerable number of aspects to take into consideration to get a more precise question about “Why is my bounce rate so high ?”. There isn’t any straight forward answer to this question, but there are many questions that can lead to possible solutions:

When you ask your questions about bounce rate here are the different questions that might come to your mind.

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

User Interface
Is my layout/presentation/design attractive to visitors ?
Does my pages load slowly ?
Do my page have appropriate ads ? Are these ads non-aggressive towards the user ?
Is your page browser friendly ? (Can be views at any resolution with any browser the same way)

Content

Does  the user find what they are looking for ? ( High bounce rate and high time on site visits)
Is there enough information to show to the user ? Do I display enough or too much ?
From keywords analysis are the entry keyword valid for the content that the entry page ?

These are few questions, and there are much more that can come across when you want to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Personally I think that depending on your audience your bounce rate will always vary. There will be always accidental clicks (people make mistakes).

As mentioned on Bounce Rate article on Wikipedia: Taking the example of news site, which have all their information on the first page itself. People might just scan the page and then exit to another website. News website might just be off having 80% bounce rate with a satisfied visitor who was able to have what he came for. From this point of view: Informative website will most likely have high bounce rate compared to E-Commerce one’s for example where you must navigate on several page to be able to perform a checkout.

A word of conclusion:

Source Wikipedia:
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

References and useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/how-high-is-your-bounce-rate/2006/02/09/

Yahoo has just opened his search engine to us developer folks, we can now mindle and medle about to improve our search result on our own website. The codename for this open API is BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). As describe in zdnet article: is this a way for Yahoo to try to get some market shares in the search industry on GOOG.

Here is an extract from Yahoo! Search BOSS YDN

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

I’ll try to experiment a bit on it, to see if i can get to integrate the search on this blog for a small…

Stop Google crawling WebResource.axd & ScriptResource.axd
As an ASP.NET developer i often get error message: “Padding is invalid and cannot be removed”. It’s a pretty annoying message that i have been trying to get rid of for days. It was caused by Google trying to index, crawl my WebResource.axd and session. But when the session expires you get this error message. Since Google caches the pages it visits the session on this page has already expired after it is crawled, when it tries to crawl the page again and request the WebResource.axd or ScriptResource.axd with an old key, an exception is raised.

Therefore to solve this problem the simple solution for that is to modify your robots.txt file in your root directory

and add the following at the end

Disallow: /ScriptResource.axd
Disallow:/WebResource.axd

With this no more issues regarding invalid padding.

If this does not solve your issue you can take a look at what other users propose here.

Some update on this issue, i found out while googling some days back:

On this post you can find out how to compress the webresource.axd and also somewhere in between prevent this error to occur.
http://mironabramson.com/blog/post/2007/10/New–Shiny–WebResourceaxd-compression-Module.aspx

Use the tool found at the website below to generate a machine key and a decryption key:
http://www.orcsweb.com/articles/aspnetmachinekey.aspx

Quoted from OmniFind website.

IBM and Yahoo! make information actionable with a simple,
no-charge enterprise search solution.

I have been able to play a few month with the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition from IBM, it’s quiet some powerful tool offered for free compared to the other search engines that are offered on the net such as Google Custom Search Business, Google Mini, ISYS Web, Mondo Search, and some other tools that are listed here(http://www.searchtools.com).

Here are the features of OYE (OmniFind Yahoo! Edition)

Search internal web sites, local and remote file systems, and the public web

• Search up to 500,000 documents and 5 separate collections
• Support for 200+ file types
• Search in 30+ languages
• Translated into 15 languages View Screen Shot

Intuitive out-of-the-box user interface with advanced features

• Based on Yahoo! Search UI View Screen Shot
• Easily customized with graphical tools to configure look-and-feel, UI elements, branding View Screen Shot
• Spell suggestion
• Full wildcard support

Increased relevancy of results

• Configurable synonyms and featured links View Screen Shot
• Tunable relevancy controls View Screen Shot
• Top queries, no results, and result click through reporting to enable fine-tuning View Screen Shot

Easy to deploy, configure, and maintain

• No prerequisites
• 3-click installer
• 1-click startup
• Go from the installer to searching in minutes

Open and extensible

• Built on Apache Lucene
• Open URL-based APIs (REST)
• Define, populate and search your own custom fields
• Easily embeddable and customizable UI output (XML/XSTL/HTML, HTML snippets)

From my point of view the only inconvenience with this tool is that is not open for any plug in or add in functionalities. That could really help make it much much better for users. But again, this tool is complete and contains all the needed functionalities for an Entry Level Enterprise Search Engine.

Here are some screen shot of the new version of the new version of OmniFind that i just upgrade from the 8.4.1