[michellegreer1]

Actually, I'm no longer self-employed. I am now the Director of Partner Marketing for the Rackspace Cloud. Sorry for not updating my "About Me" page but I've been pretty busy lately.

As a marketer, I always try to think of what's best for the customer. In terms of bounce rate, it's actually pretty annoying to THINK you are going to find the right page when you Google it, only to discover something useless to you. So I try to keep bounce rates low because it increases customer happiness.

Maybe it makes me a wuss to think that way, but I've honestly never had an issue producing ROI.

[patio11]

In terms of bounce rate, it's actually pretty annoying to THINK you are going to find the right page when you Google it, only to discover something useless to you. So I try to keep bounce rates low because it increases customer happiness.

I see what you're saying in the first sentence but I do not think that the second sentence follows from it. For customers who are in goal-directed mode, often times a bounce is the positive outcome and multiple page views are the negative outcome.

As a trivial example: suppose someone Googles [Rackspace affiliate program phone number]. Their intent is crystal clear: they want to call you. http://www.rackspace.com/information/contactus.php achieves their task and will almost certainly result in a bounce. If you wanted to reduce your bounce rate, you could put the contact link four clicks down and do several millions in usability research devoted to discovering new, innovative ways to get people not to click on it, but that would be prioritizing a meaningless and arbitrary metric over your customer satisfaction.

P.S. If there is anyone reading this from Google please don't get any ideas about new research projects from the above paragraph.

[paraschopra]

Yes, if you define bounce rate by number of pageviews, then this holds true. I wish I could have defined bounce as visitors who spend less than say 10 seconds on website but calculating exact time on page in realtime is very expensive operation which most web analytics tools don't do.

A typical example supporting your case would be a blog post. Most people come to your blog post via a link and they read the post and they go back to whatever they were doing. Even when web analytics tools will call them a bounce (because they just saw one page), I would say them non-bounce because they spent time doing what they came here for.

[ErrantX]

> If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.

This is a worrying statement from someone who is supposedly a web marketing expert!

There are some inconsistencies too; now your claiming bounce rate is important for customer sanity - something I certainly would agree with! But I'm not sure you can logically extend that to linking with conversions.

As a programmer foremost I think I am a pretty good marketer too; so perhaps that's why I find what your saying disagreeable. Indeed I work with someone [as a consultancy] who describes himself as a "people person" and marketeer (and is supposedly a good one). He can't, alone, sell my software for jack shit...

I think there is room in these analogies for a middle ground where we can pool our skills; programmers to explain it, marketers to give it that needed gloss.

Also I feel none of your points (in the blog) are rocket science; it does something of a disservice to programmers, who tend to be very bright, to suggest that is where they fail. I think the key points we fail are as follows:

- difficulty in writing good, non-technical, copy

- looking objectively at the subject matter

- spotting where a "newbie" to a site/software might get confused on it's purpose how it works (and then explaining or working round that)

On the other hand we tend to be good at things like solid SEO, keyword marketing, spreading the word in a grass roots way - etc.

The only thing I would agree with is design; a lot of people try to sell bare metal work with the promise of a "custom design". That never works - your better off with a sexy design and a few missing, soon to appear, features :)

There are programmers who ARE struggling with the basics, I agree. But Im sure there are good and bad people in marketing.

[DougBTX]

An example of how to reduce bounce rates: http://www.marco.org/237630497