Bounce rates and free sites
 

Was just looking at the free sites I submitted over the last week or so, and see I have one site as low as 11.56%, and one site as high as 62.59%.

The site with the lowest bounce rate, in my opinion has really plain girls taking their pics, looking kinda goofy, and I can't figure out why that would rank #1, other than I have really really big text/ads on it.
http://www.gfsfree.com/free-sites/FO...x-girlfriends/ One of the few sites I've built that had hosted galleries.


Do you see such a wide variance in your sites? Anything common about the best or worst? The only thing I see as a trend is my 3D sites tend to have worst bounce rates then my non 3D sites, other than that, niche, etc. really varies. The 3D might be that I also submit the sites to non toon categories, and people back out when they see toons (even though a lot of my stuff, its hard to tell they are not real people)

Since we don't get as much traffic to free sites anymore, I thought if we shared our experiences, maybe we'd figure out some tips for lowering our bounce rates.

One of the arguments for high bounce rate is page load, and the site I posted up, probably has the highest page load of any free site I've done in the last week, so that argument doesn't always work either. |huh

If I knew what a bounce rate was I might be able to comment. :D

I think you should keep the 3D sites in the toon cats. It makes for a better fit for the surfer your looking for.

For Major Stress: "Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site."

On the 5 recent sites I've done, they've had a bounce rate of 15-18%. Since most of the sites I've done had movie clips, I suspect surfers viewing a clip or two led to a low bounce rate. Not sure what it means. My experience from a number of years ago is that a sale from a freesite usually takes place either from the warning page or the main page. If the surfer gets to a gallery you've lost them. I can tell you that on a site that relies on Google SE traffic, the bounce rate can be very high (80% +).

Hope that helps. I am interested in what others might have to say.

My bounce rates on the erotica sites I've done recently hold steady at around 25%, but I'm keeping a close eye on it out of curiosity. I'll post more if/when I have more data.

Ditto.

Toon sites only should go in toons.
(on my very long to do list is to break toons down into sub categories)

Even when, for instance, if I do a fantasy for women toons specifically for women? Like the site I submitted today, this is geared towards a female audience, and not necessarily to a toon audience (which I would think would be more male). Maybe I'm doing that wrong. |huh

http://www.free-porn-for-women.net/f...the-elemental/

Do you have clips on your warning or index page, or do you think because they know they will see movies inside?

Toons go in toons only. My LL has a search so if you give it a good description that contains for women at least it can be found that way.

What is really needed is sub categories for toons like I have at my tube.

I've also seen that the bounce rate varies from the source of traffic a LOT. For instance, Tommy's Bookmarks tends on a whole to be higher (probably because he has more galleries then free sites) and Danger Dave and Link O Rama tend to be lower. I had one site with only a 1.08|thumb% bounce rate from LOR.

The rest of us sometimes are higher, sometimes lower.

I'll try that after today (already submitted today) and see if it changes.

I think it was a better fit in the anime category and moved it there. I just don't seeing 3D toon sites fitting in a non toon/anime category.

I guess I did it differently because was my perception of toons is cartoon looking line drawings, not models that look close to real. I never really thought of it like you guys are pointing out. Thanks.

If you submitted that to my For Women cat I'd list it in Toons as well, but I agree that it's definitely targeting a female audience. Guys don't even like subtitles in their porn :)

Edit: Agreed with those above, I put anything 3D/Anime/Cartoon (don't see much of the last one) in the Toons cat.

No, just in the gallery pages. You can see my sig. It has a link to my 5 recent freesites (without recips). Some of the clips I used were a minute long so that will decrease the bounce rate right there.

I was giving this some thought while I was at the grocery store. A high bounce rate by itself doesn't give you much information because it could indicate the surfer immediately clicked through to the sponsor which is, potentially, a good thing. A low bounce rate might mean he's is looking at each and every sample you give him and will never click through. I think that you also need to look at the stats from the sponsor's program to find out the referring URL. If the surfer comes from a freesite with a high bounce rate and came from index.html or main.html then, while still not a sale, you're getting closer to converting.

P.S. Just looked at one sponsor's referring URLs for a day -- 93% came from the index.html or main.html page. Only 7% clicked through from the gallery pages! The sample size was not huge but it seems to be similar to other days.

Bounce rates are only surfers, as I understand it, that go to your site, and exit out (bounce out) without clicking any links.

And I agree, in of itself it doesn't mean anything. My problem too is with my AVS sites, NetVerifer does not track where the referring joins came from. So I haven't a clue what is converting my traffic. I get sales, I keep members, but which gallery/free sites/ se link they came from, I don't know. I can look and say, I submitted a free site yesterday, got a sale today, but is it from that free site, a gallery I submitted 2 weeks ago, or a link that is spidered in a search engine? That really drives me crazy.

Google describes "Bounce Rate" as,

"... the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy."

It doesn't say whether they close the window, type in a different URL or click on a sponsor link. Who knows.

I just looked at a site I submitted on 8/4. I've had 1441 visits from LL so far, 265 clicked through to my AVS site, 1 signup so far.

So that means 18% of the visitors clicked on links, and I'm 1/265 on the traffic that went to the site. Not sure if these are good numbers or not.

Free site shows a 34% bounce. So if it is counting clicks off site as part of the bounce, 16% actually left the site without clicking into it, or clicking on a sponsor site. Does that sound how you are taking it to read Art?

Your are right on clicking from the index page.
Index 229
main 7
gallery 1 - 18
gallery 2 - 11
Most of the traffic is definitely flowing from the index page, at least for this one.