Bounce Rates on Paid Vs Organic Traffic

Bounce Rates. Experienced people know that higher bounce rates on paid search traffic can impact organic rankings. Generally the rule of thumb is to lower bounce rates on paid campaigns to reduce low quality traffic. As display remarketing also impacts organic rankings (i.e. the number of visitors who click on a remarketing ad and return to your website), the quality of traffic is super important.

Let me unpack this more. The below graph shows the 90% bounce rate a client had been strangled with for several months after spending $7,000 a month on Google Adwords. That’s $6,000 wasted per month.

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Now let us have a look at the impact of the reduction in bounce rate on organic and direct traffic once the high bounce rate ads inside Google were turned off. Notice there was a 78% improvement in overall bounce rate. Organic bounce rate reduced from 24% to 10% and direct traffic bounce rate dropped from 24% to 4%. You don’t often get to see the causality between paid traffic bounce rates and organic / direct traffic bounce rates yet they are correlated. Oh and the conversion rates on paid traffic were 5x as a result and 6x from organic.Screen Shot 2020-07-05 at 4.08.10 PM

You can think of Google as a foghorn. What you do in paid echos across all other audiences. Remember, if you allow your paid search traffic to put non qualified traffic in the top of the funnel, it affects all the other non paid traffic quality and conversions coming to your website. Simply put, rubbish in rubbish out !

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