When is it right to use metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site? When are you better off ignoring them? There are endless opinions on whether these kinds of metrics are valuable or not, and as you might suspect, the answer is found in the shades of grey. Learn what Rand has to say about the great metrics debate in today's episode of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about times at which bounce rate, browse rate, which is pages per visit, and time on site are terrible metrics and when they're actually quite useful metrics.
This happens quite a bit. I see in the digital marketing world people talking about these metrics as though they are either dirty-scum, bottom-of-the-barrel metrics that no one should pay any attention to, or that they are these lofty, perfect metrics that are what we should be optimizing for. Neither of those is really accurate. As is often the case, the truth usually lies somewhere in between.
So, first off, some credit to Wil Reynolds, who brought this up during a discussion that I had with him[1] at Siege Media's offices, an interview that Ross Hudgens put together with us, and Sayf Sharif from Seer Interactive, their Director of Analytics, who left an awesome comment[2] about this discussion on the LinkedIn post of that video. We'll link to those in this Whiteboard Friday.
So Sayf and Wil were both basically arguing that these are kind of crap metrics. We don't trust them. We don't use them a lot. I think, a lot