What do you think a good bounce rate for a directory is? Obviously it can often be higher than with otehr types of site/ecommerce site - particularly when it is new. I'm getting around 70% at the moment whereas my e-commerce sites/blogs are more like 40-50% is this really high?
A general directory where only submitters visit will get a high bounce rate if a normal web user visits and finds empty categories. However my fruitydirectory gets around a 50% bounce rate. Users view around 2 pages before leaving, sometimes more, sometimes less
decent bounce rate? the higher the better or the lower the better? i have always considered the high bounce rate to be good, if a visitor comes to my site and gets everything on the landing page and moves away Satisfied without visiting any other page!! i think it is good unless he hits his browser's back button i would give the "time spent on the site" a bit more importance than bounce rate!
If visitors aren't viewing much on the site, they are either not interested, site has no content, or you have the wrong visitor type. All 3 are bad news for a directory.
Bounce rates and directories shouldn't even be in the same sentence i personally feel. Making a few exceptions, people either visit to submit, by accident or to check their still listed. If you have an interesting article they may stay to read it, or a person may be spying on you, like hyper does with me.
Why should a directory be any different to another kind of site? Bounce rate obviously being important then
This is why directories don't work like they used to - if they ever did that is. Once Yellow pages (former BT owned) and Thomson owned the market, few made it to that level, others struggled along and many make little at all. Now we have directories charging quite expensive fees to other directories, and then directories become useless as a resource. Saturation of a market always kills that market, pretty obvious really. The pricey fees don't exactly help either, by pushing advertisers away, instead of filling the resource so it becomes useful and successful.
For sure there are some valuable comments here - I guess its a strange market to judge in terms of BR - many users can land on homepage and if they don't see enough PR they can leave immediately - guess it depends what you are looking for from a directory...
They should be looking for traffic, er submitters that is. It amazes me why so many try to get that big SERP advantage, then throw it away by flogging paid links Crazy. Any webmaster that attempts to use my business as a dumping ground for their pathetic PR-driven site links, gets deleted so fast they won't know what day of the week is - and they lose their submit fee. Got to be brutal to be kind.
I remember checking business.com a while back and their average pageviews per visitor was under 2. That to me says even they have a high bounce rate.
I guess its never going to rival an information resource like wiki or even an e-commerce or shopping site because of what has been discussed above, but I'd like to try and lower it all the same. Is there anything I can do to hold visitors - top landing page is homepage
Try and look at your site and see it as a visitor would, ask yourself would you stay and look around ? there is no magic bullet just hard work and constant tweaking and even then all things change so there is no static I have it right answer. During the Month of November, 2008: The average visit lasted 7 Minutes . The average visit contained 14.48 page views.
Its nothing special but I do not promote it here ( i will PM you the link) I have been working on using several entry points and that seems to work where you bring people in on or close to topic i.e mysite.com/auto , mysite.com/blogs etc etc and still only very early days in testung