Do you wonder what factors indicate how your user or website visitor interacts with your content? Do they like the content? Do they find it useful or relevant? Or are they dissatisfied with it?
For answers to such questions, a beginner could rely upon bounce rate and pogo-sticking. Pogo sticking and bounce rate give you signals on how your audience is interacting with your content. Both would seem pretty similar unless you look at them closely. In the upcoming article, we will share all basic information that would help you understand and distinguish pogo sticking and bounce rate so you can use it to improve the user experience on your website.
Both things are generally considered bad for any website, but with a better understanding of the terms, you would realize that sometimes bounce rate is not as bad as it may appear. The good news is that you can reduce pogo-sticking and bounce rate with a few tweaks and adjustments, resulting in a better website with higher rankings.
What is Dwell Time?
To understand bounce rate and pogo-sticking, one needs to understand the basics of dwell time. It is nothing but the amount of time a person spends on a webpage.
Pogo Sticking and Bounce Rate are nothing but a way to measure Dwell Time.
Pogo Sticking has a very short Dwell Time on a page. On the contrary, Bounce Rate can have both extremely low Dwell Time and extremely high Dwell Time.
It’s usually a positive sign when the Time on Page (Dwell Time) corresponds to the number of words and scroll depth. However, if the Time on Page is too short (a few seconds), it is a dead giveaway of a poor user experience.
So if a user visits your webpage and interacts with the content by delving deeper into and visiting other links on your website, then you can already consider yourself on the safe side. But if the user has visited the result page but has not yet interacted so far, then either you can face pogo-sticking or bounce back depending upon the time he spends on the page.
What is Bounce Rate?
The term “bounce rate” refers to an Internet term used for web traffic analysis. It denotes the proportion of visitors who enter the site and then leave or bounce rather than view other pages on the same site or perform a specific action, such as purchasing something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
The bounce rate is a metric for “stickiness.” The assumption is that an effective website will draw visitors in deeper, encouraging visitors to stay for the duration of their visit.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate interpretation should be relevant to a website’s business objectives and conversion definitions, as having a high bounce rate is not always a sign of poor performance.
To define a good bounce rate for your site, you must first understand the distinction between a high and a low bounce rate.
A high bounce rate indicates that a visitor’s overall session duration is very short time they visit a page on your site and then exit. A low bounce rate indicates that visitors stay on a page for a long time and click on available links.
However, a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing because it can indicate that, while the visitor didn’t go deeper into the site, he did spend some time on the page and got an answer to his question. He may have bookmarked the page or shared it on Facebook, but he did not read any further, resulting in a bounce.
E-commerce sites have the lowest average Bounce rate of around 20-45 percent, while blogs have a Bounce rate that can reach up to 90%.
The bounce rate of an e-commerce site could be interpreted with the purchase conversion rate, assuming that the bounces are representative of visits where no purchase was made.
A bounce rate of 56 percent to 70 percent is considered high, and a bounce rate of 41 percent to 55 percent is considered average. The ideal bounce rate should be between 26% and 40%.
Measurement of Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of visits by the number of single-page visits. It is then expressed as a percentage of the total number of visits.
For example, if 100 users visit your website (total sessions) and 5 of them leave without making another request (single-page sessions), your website’s bounce rate is 5%.
Significance of Bounce Rate
If you’re a marketer, you should be aware of the bounce rate and how it affects your overall digital marketing strategy. A high bounce rate, for example, may indicate technical SEO issues, such as a slow page load time or irrelevant page content, which is confusing your site visitors, making them view that page and then click away.
On the contrary, a low bounce rate on an entry page indicates that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue deeper into the website.
It indicates how well or how poorly people engage with the content or user experience of a webpage. You can use bounce rates to assess the effectiveness or performance of an entry page in generating visitor interest.
The bounce rate is highly significant mainly because of the below-mentioned reasons:
- When you prevent a visitor from leaving, you can increase your conversion rate.
- A high Bounce Rate indicates that your site (or specific pages on your site) has content, user experience, page layout, or copywriting issues.
- The bounce Rate could be a Google Ranking Factor. In fact, according to one industry study, Bounce Rate is closely related to first-page Google rankings.
Pogo Sticking in Bounce rate
Pogo-sticking in SEO is defined as going back and forth from a search engine results page (SERP) to an individual search result destination site. Usually, pogo-sticking occurs when a searcher clicks on a link on a SERP and realizes that this is not what they were looking for, and thus they immediately click the back button.
Pogo sticking indicates that your website is not properly answering people’s questions and queries. It could also mean that the webpage was not responsive enough, or the website owners had a very irresponsible attitude and didn’t bother reading the questions and queries asked by the viewers.
Pogo-sticking is a direct result of immediate dissatisfaction with the search result, and, unlike bounce rate, it is always a bad thing.
Criteria | Pogo Sticking | Bounce Rate |
Dwell Time | The user doesn’t spend more than 4-5 seconds on a page. | The user can spend as little as a few seconds or as much as several hours. |
User experience | The user is dissatisfied with the page’s content. | The user may or may not be satisfied with the page’s content. |
Relevance | It is more relevant to search engine results pages (SERPs). | It only applies to websites and blogs. |
Nature | Pogo Sticking is always considered a negative trait for a website | The bounce rate is not always negative.
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Comparison of Bounce rate and pogo sticking in SEO
Disadvantages of Pogo Sticking
Google dislikes pogo-sticking more than high bounce rates because pogo-sticking occurs within the first 5 seconds of viewing the page. This indicates that your website is not doing enough to answer people’s questions and queries. Google notices if you have a lot of people pogo-sticking on and off your site, they will penalize you.
What causes Pogo Sticking?
To understand the cause of your website’s Pogo-sticking, you need to pretend that you are a search engine user. Consider yourself a user, not a customer. What searches can be performed so that your website appears, or why your website appears high on page rank, and you discovered the query irrelevant to the search query?
Pogo sticking is caused by a sudden dissatisfaction with one of your website’s features. However, with so many things that can go wrong in those precious five seconds, determine exactly what’s wrong with any given page.
Conduct a user survey to get a better understanding. Ask your coworkers or friends to visit your website for search topics and explain why they don’t find it beneficial or why they want to leave your website. There could be a variety of reasons why users did not find your website relevant or interesting.
Pogo sticking in SEO can be caused by two reasons mainly:
- Content-Based
- Non-content based
Content-Based
- The content does not match the title or meta description.
- The content is loaded with grammar and spelling mistakes.
- The content is spammy.
- The content doesn’t match the site’s focus.
Non-content based
- Slow loading of the page
- Too many pop-up windows
- A confusing or outdated design
- Videos that auto-play
- Lack of usability
You Can Also Read, Rank Math or Yoast SEO: difference and which is better?
How can you Reduce the Bounce Rate?
One can optimize a web page by using various techniques to reduce the Bounce Rates mentioned below which can be implemented for better results.
- Use of proper heading Tags
- By writing a short Introduction
- Use of images and GIFs
- By inserting Videos
- By inserting Anecdotes
Discover more such elements of SEO from a dedicated digital marketing course in Bhilwara and learn ways to rank your website higher on the search engine results page.
Conclusions Drawn
The percentage of visitors who visit a single page on a website is the bounce rate. A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing because it can indicate that, while the visitor didn’t go deeper into the site, he did spend some time on the page and got an answer to his question. He may have bookmarked the page or shared it on Facebook, but he did not read any further, resulting in a bounce.
When a user performs a search and clicks on a result, quickly back to the search result page and goes on to a different result, referred to as pogo-sticking in SEO. This type of behavior is a direct result of immediate dissatisfaction with the search results.
Unlike the bounce rate, where a high bounce rate is not always considered negative, a pogo-sticking is always considered negative for any website.
In Simpler Terms, a pogo-sticking is related to search engine traffic, whereas the bounce rate is related to all traffic sources, including search.
Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ)
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What is the Importance of Bounce Rate?
Bounce rates are very important as they indicate whether or not the page content is relevant to your site visitors. A high bounce rate on your home page, for example, is concerning because it indicates that consumers are simply browsing that page and then clicking away. Hence, it would help to make your homepage engaging and interactive so that a visitor browses other pages.
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Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?
Firstly, on a scale of 1 to 100, a high bounce rate means more than 70. And, if your website has a high bounce rate, it generally means the user is not visiting any other page of your website after opening the result page. But a high bounce rate is not always bad.
For instance, if you are getting leads or conversions on the same result page and it does not redirect to any other page after the action is performed. Then in this scenario, the page will have a high bounce rate, but the same page is still getting you all the leads at the same time.
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What is a Good Bounce Rate?
A good bounce rate may indicate that although most visitors are not opening other pages of the website, they are spending more time on the result page or are interacting in other ways like sharing it with others, etc.
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How do you stop pogo-sticking?
There could be multiple reasons why people are pogo-sticking on your website. So first of all, you need to find out those reasons and try removing the cons. Some general steps to stop pogo-sticking include:
- Reduce page load time
- Optimize the title and introduction of the content
- Optimize images and other media included in the content
- Target the right keywords for the right content to increase relevancy.
- Use attractive and interactive elements like CTA, better fonts, background, etc.
One must always meet the two most important factors in their content: user intent and solution for the user’s query.
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What is more dangerous for website pogo-sticking or bounce rate?
Pogo sticking is more dangerous for any website than bounce rate. As we discussed above, bounce rate can be defined as good and bad or low and high. This means that at least some of the grass is green in case of bounce rate. But pogo-sticking is always bad for any website.