Bounce rates and free sites

[ArtWilliams]

Originally Posted by RedCherry

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

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.