Stats Tutorial Part 4 – Time on Site and Bounce Rates
For the last few weeks we have been working our way through stats.
We are at Part 4 – for the previous posts check here, here and here.
Let’s move on to “time spent on site” and the “bounce rate.” It seems that everyone and their dog are willing to spout an opinion about how long your blog posts should be and whether or note you should have a magazine format for your site.
Two points here: firstly, you need to compare apples to apples – if someone is suggesting an ideal word count for your posts, ensure that they are talking about word count for your niche of blog. It is unfair to compare marketing blogs with author blogs, as an example. Secondly, I feel that these decisions should be made on the basis of your stats.
To start with we need to find out where to find these numbers. Both the “Average Session Duration” and “Bounce Rate” are found on the Dashboard or the first thing you see when you log in. The Average Session Duration is the average amount of time spent on the site. Look at that number, set a timer for that amount of time and read something until the timer goes off. That will give you a general feel for how much your readers are reading. If the average is over a minute, you are actually keeping their attention for a good amount of time! But…I’ve read quite a few posts recently suggesting that authors write 1500 to 2000 words for every post. Can you read 2000 words in a minute or less?
Let’s expand on that to talk about magazine format blogs. This format is one where only an excerpt shows of the post. The reader must click on a button or text link to read the entirety of the post. I’m not a huge fan of this format for authors as I feel that readers of blogs are innately lazy and more often than not, they do not click to read more, they just move on. Keep in mind that every audience is different and generalities are dangerous to make, but your stats will tell you what’s happening on your site.
To answer this question, we want to look at not only the time that readers spend on our site, but also look at what’s called bounce rate. Bounce rate can be defined as “the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.” Bounce rate is a number needs to be taken into context. If your landing page – ie, the page that people land on when they type in your direct URL – is blog posts and they are displayed in their full version – only viewing one page is not a bad thing. If your landing page is a welcome page that gives a short blurb about you and your books and that’s where the majority of your traffic starts, it’s a bad thing if they leave after one page. That means that they aren’t reading any of your blog posts.
Before you have a panic attack – as I did when I first figured out what ‘bounce rate’ was – you need to take these number into context. First figure out where your audience starts their visit to your site and then look at bounce rate. To add a bit more context, Google Analytics will also tell you the average number of pages viewed. So do they start one place and quickly more elsewhere? There are various strategies to link posts to one another as well as link them to various other sources of information to keep readers on your blog longer. I feel that the longer you can keep a reader on your blog reading and looking around, the more likely you are to get a sale or a subscription to your site.
Make sure you watch for next week’s post as we bite off another manageable chunk of stats information to chew on 
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I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published just over a week ago. In other news, I handed ‘Blogging for Authors’ in to my editor on Friday – hopefully that title will be out on Amazon in just a short while!
Stay tuned for news.
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