Shouldn't Lower Bounce Rate Correlate into Greater Click Thru Rate for a Web Site?

[Kingalan1]

Greetings:

I run a real estate web site in New York City with about 650 pages out of which 330 are property listing pages. About 250 of those listing pages contain less than 150 words of content.

In late August I set about 250 of the listing pages that generated the least traffic (generally corresponding to those with the least content) to "no-index, follow". Now Google has removed those pages from their index.

The overall bounce rate for the site has been reduced from about 69% to about 64% since the removal of these low quality listing pages.

However the click thru rate has not improved and is stuck at about 2.2 pages per visitor.

Shouldn't the click thru rate improve if the bounce rate goes own? Am I missing something?

Also, is a lower bounce rate something that Google will take into account when calculating rank?

Thanks, Alan

[farahat]

Hi Alan,

I assume you mean pageviews per visit rather than click through rate, since you mentioned 2.2 pages/visit.

Pageviews per visit is the average number of pages viewed per session, while bounce rate is single page visits.

Normally, the answer is yes where lower bounce rates would usually correlate with higher average pageviews per visit, however the correlation is not that high since there are many factors included over here (Sources of traffic, landing pages, search keywords, and the list goes on).

So the assumption here is that you would be getting the same quality of visitors, however with decreasing single page visits which would normally increase the pageviews per visit. However bounce rate moving from 69% to 64% is not that big of a difference, and I am not sure what the sample size is for these visits.

I would recommend that you check landing pages with high pageview per visit and start focusing your marketing efforts there and you should find an increase in average pageviews/visit.

With regards to bounce rate affecting rankings, well this only applies for bounce rate you get from organic traffic, since google can not actually determine your overall website bounce rate (or atleast they claim they don't use analytics data), so make sure that your top organic landing pages are well optimized for their target terms with proper call to actions to avoid bounces over there.

Hope this was helpful.

Have a great day,

Moe

[Atlanta-SMO]

Hey Alan,

You said that you made these changes in late August. Could it be that Google hasn't updated this number for you in the one week ish amount of time it has been since you made the changes? It seems odd that the number would stay exactly the same.

[Kingalan1]

Good idea, however according to Google Webmaster Tools under Google Index>Index Status the number of indexed pages has been dropping. It is down by 120 which is about half the 250 which we have set to "no-index, follow" on August 20th. I suspect it may be down a bit more as the results on Webmaster Tools may lag a bit.

I just can't explain why the pages views per visitor has not increased if the bounce rate is down. If the bounce rate has decreased from about 69% in August to 63% in September which means that 37% of visitors are staying on the site instead of 31% which is significant improvement (about 18%). I would think this would translate into more page views per visitor. But it has not. Pages views per session was 2.38 in August and 2.18 in September. This seems impossible.

Thanks, Alan