Click Fraud Blog
Baselining - Bouce Rate
December 20th, 2007
In a continuing series about base lining, I discuss Bounce Rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a metric which describes a users activity when they visit your site. If a person clicks though from an ad, or search engine result and immediately leaves your site, without looking at other pages, they have bounced. It is the aim of sites to have as low a bounce rate as possible. This means they are engaging with your content. A highly desirable thing for search engine marketers.
The Google Analytic Bounce Rate
As mentioned in Baselining to Protect Your Campaigns I suggested you should install and begin collecting data using Google analytics. This free tool collects and presents a large number of useful analytics.
The benefit of using Google Analytics is the fact that bounce rate is presented by default on the front page, and no complex analysis of time on site and depth of visit is required.
Why Baseline Bounce Rate
As mention bounce rate is an analysis of a users activity when you visit a site. The profile of a click fraudster is someone who will click through on your ad, and immediately leave.
This is especially true of bot activity and publisher click fraud where the main point is to click on as many ads as possible leave a site as soon as possible.
What to Baseline
You should be aware of your normal bounce rate. Mine is currently in the range of 43%. You should monitor and perhaps plot your bounce rate using analytics. If you see a sharp increase in bounce rate, this should make you ask questions. What have you done? Is there a change to your site? If not, and it is business as usual, you should start investigating your logs files in depth. I will discuss this in much more detail in another post in this series.
Caveat
Bounce rate should be used with other metrics to judge if your campaigns are at risk. The reason people are using click farms is to imitate a real user visiting your sites, clicking through to multiple pages, and perhaps adding a
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