A Look At Bounce Rate For Car Dealer Websites

Bounce is the percentage of visitors thatvisit a page of your website for only a few seconds before immediatelyleaving. The bounce rate of visitors from both organic and paid searchcan help to measure the quality of traffic your website or marketingefforts are bringing in. High quality traffic, such as those who areactively looking for a nearby car dealership, are less likely to bouncethan someone who lives two states away that accidentally clicked onyour ad or organic listing.

Ideally, the lower the bounce rate thebetter. As mentioned above, it means more qualified traffic is beingsent to your site. But a low bounce rate is also an indicator of thequality of content you provide on your site. For example, if you weresearching for used cars Nashville,you most likely would want to see a page with used car inventory,rather than a page about financing or some other unrelated topic.

Google defines bounce rate as follows from the Google Analytics product documentation:

Bounce rate is the percentage ofsingle-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site fromthe entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and ahigh bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pagesarent relevant to your visitors.

While there are numerous rankings factorstaken into account both on-site and off-site, its also likely thatranking factors are also present from within the SERPs. Googleis able to assess data from within their own results, and its likelythat this includes bounce rate. Bounce rate can also easily be assessedfrom Googles popular products, such as the Google toolbar or Google Analytics. This metric can also be measured by how many times the same user visits the search engine.

How can my dealerships bounce rate be lowered?

As already mentioned, a high bounce rate is generally a sign of twothings. First, the quality of the webpage may be low, meaning theusability is poor or theres simply a lack of quality, engagingcontent. Secondly, bounce rate may be a sign of unqualified trafficbeing delivered to the site, such as from a PPC campaign that needsmore refined targeting.

Tailoring landing pages to a specific purpose or keyword will alsobe crucial for reducing bounce rate and improving conversion. Forexample, if someone is searching for new floor mats for their ToyotaTundra, why not send them to a designated Toyota accessories webpage rather than a generic Service page?

Refining your content and landing pageswill not only reduce bounce rate in most cases, but you can also expectmore organic search traffic, especially for low-volume, high-convertinglong-tail search terms.

Although bounce rate may play a very minor role in rankings, andgenerally can indicate low user engagement, the metric can often bemisleading. While quality content remains crucial for any website, acar dealers website serves a very utilitarian purpose. To that effect,many bounces can result from users immediately finding yourdealerships phone number to schedule a service appointment. Others mayperform a search for Detroit Chevrolet dealerssimply to get the address of the nearest Chevy dealer in order to checkout their new car inventory in person. Although those two scenarios mayresult in bounces in your statistics, those users may have convertedand become customers anyway.

While bounce rate is an important metric, it can often be perceivedas a bigger red flag than it should be as a certain amount of bouncesare simply inevitable. When it comes to the car business, leads andsales are everything, and sometimes having what looks to be a highbounce rate may be an indication of your website doing exactly whatits supposed to be doing – driving people to your dealership.