Bounce rates have been a concern of many bloggers especially those who use Entrecard. It’s THE biggest complaint surrounding this popular social networking enterprise and it’s one that will continue to haunt it’s users as long as “dropping cards” is the primary focus of the network.
Most other social networks simply use post submissions as driving elements or, like Blog Catalog are a simple catalog of blog sites that you can peruse and visit those that appeal to you. Other social networks rely on site visitors to “vote up or down” a particular post that was submitted. Entrecard is different from all of those with it’s system of visiting sites and “dropping your cards”. You get credits for dropping, credits for being dropped on and credits for advertising other blogs on your website 24 hours at a time.
There are a lot of criticisms of Entrecard’s methodology. Bits and pieces of it are torn apart by it’s users; both proponents and detractors at some point try to rethink the way it works because like any thing else in this world, it doesn’t please (nor can it ever) everyone.
Which doesn’t make it perfect either.
But the goal of this post is not to hash out the pluses or minuses of Entrecard, but rather to address the bounce rate it generates.
I’ve been a member since November of last year and, like many others have run the gamut of beginner, top dropper to now balancing Entrecard with all the other things in life that I must attend to.
Dropping cards takes a LOT of time especially if you’re trying to do the maximum number of drops over more than one blog.
And, to be honest, this is where your bounces come from.
By dropping those 300x cards, you encourage and invite those bounces.
I’ve changed my dropping tactics by a couple of different means. One to reduce bounce on other blogs and the other to help curtail my own bounce rate.
I am only dropping on about 50 sites per day from this blog and those are all in my favorites and are blogs that I enjoy reading and often comment on or stumble posts on. I also, instead of closing each of the pages as I drop, once I’ve finished dropping under one blog account, change to the next in my toolbar, then go back through all the tabs clicking on other articles on the sites which reloads the entrecard widget enabling me to drop for that account. This action should significantly reduce my bounce rates on those blogs I do still drop on. This is difficult to do on some of the blogspot blogs because not all of them show the side bars on the individual posts, but still clicking through to a post and then back should not result in a “bounce”.
My own results from slowing down my dropping and moving the widget show some big changes in my statistics. Maybe this is an anomaly, but going from a 90% bounce rate with an average visit of 11 seconds to a 30% bounce rate with an average visit of 1.36 minutes is a pretty significant change to my way of thinking and that’s how it’s been for the past 2 weeks! And I WAS going to include a screen shot of my Woopra statistics to show you, but it doesn’t seem to be working right now. If it comes back up, I’ll update the post with a screen shot and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I know many of you have dropped Entrecard recently. What do your stats show you regarding bounce rate and average times spent on site? Are you seeing improvements? Do you feel like your visitor count is now reflecting people who are truly interested in what you have to say and show?
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I’m working hard to lower my bounce rate. Now that evidence suggests high bounce rates effect your search engine rankings, I take them a little more seriously. Those who claim bounce rates don’t matter for blogs have yet to link to one shred of evidence. They claim to remember some vague Matt Cutts comment they can never produce when challenged.
Turnip | Social Networking´s last blog post..Social Networking Guide: From Droplist To Stumble List
Interesting that lowering your card lowered your bounce rate, what a great idea. I’ll see how that effects my bounce rate. Great post.
@Turnip — Yes, I’ve seen Matt Cutts referenced pretty often with regards to bounce rate, but when I google it, I come up with not much and nothing on his own blog. When asked recently in an interview done on one website at some conference he was at, he seemed to duck the issue.
There are some times when bounce rate should be ignored, but for sites like yours and mine, we need to be paying attention. This is my last frontier in the effort to get PR for this site. It seems to be the last stumbling block and I’ll be very interested in seeing if I get any PR when the next update is done.
@gina — I’m sure my frequency of dropping had something to do with it as well as moving the widget down. The drop-and-go want the widget at the top of the page so they can click away that much faster and get the 300 clicks in as short a time as they can and I don’t blame them — when I was dropping 300 per day, I did, too! It takes a LOT of time to do all that, but that’s less time blogging (and cooking) and there are way more better returns on that time than EC credits that you cannot convert to cold hard cash.
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Thanks for the great ideas about how to decrease the bounce rate. I have personally been conscious of this when visiting other sites, purposely either clicking on a link, or waiting for a while before I drop. I hope the same love is coming back at me
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@Steve — I echo your hope
Thanks for dropping in and joining in the conversation. I hope you come back again real soon!
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Like you, I was dropping 300 EC’s a day and making myself a nervous wreck. Didn’t even think about bounce rate. Several weeks ago, I cut way back–only dropping on my favorites, my EC advertisers and sites that particularly intrigued me. I haven’t even checked my stats to see if my bounce rate has improved. Obviously, I have less traffic, but it hasn’t seemed to decrease the number of comments I am getting and that is really more important to me. I am going to try your idea about moving the widget down and see. The location of the widget doesn’t bother me much now because I typically go to the same sites and I know where the widgets are so I don’t have to search for them.
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Patricia — thank you for dropping in on the conversation! I think a pretty significant number of long-time Entrecarders are seeing the light about “power dropping”.
Please don’t get me wrong — Entrecard still serves a service that is valuable in it’s own right and according to my inbox, I still get visitors (and droppers) from blogs I don’t frequent.
It’s still necessary to participate as commenters on other blogs, posters in various forums and goes without saying that the subject matter on your blog needs to generate interest.
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Thanks for this. I wasn’t too aware about bounce rates and how they affected blogs. Guess it’s time for me to do a bit more research into this.
And yes, I’ll try to follow your practice and move my Entrecard link down as well.
By the way, what stats software do you use to monitor bounce rates? On my hosting, I have webalizer and awstats.
topbanana´s last blog post..The Tiger and the Strawberry
In the last 3 weeks or so I managed to drop my blog’s bounce rate from 89% to about 60%. All I did to manage this was to remove the Entrecard widget. My Stumble traffic seems to be increasing these days and this could reverse the situation. It is not only Entrecard that has this inherent problem.
At the end of the day, the only sure-fire way of keeping that bounce rate curtailed is great content. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a quick fix for this problem. If we like to admit it or not, we have to try and increase the quality of our content. Easier said than done.
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I’m an avid Entrecard dropper but I have, as of recent, been making a concerted effort to actually read and comment if I have something valuable to say.
I won’t just post a comment for the sake of comment posting however. It’s probably pretty obvious if I were to post and I hadn’t read the article. I get that a lot on my blog, and even though it’s not necessarily a “spam post”, I delete it. It’s not necessarily valuable to myself or my readers.
But I definitely understand the gripe behind social networking type sites. Ultimately it helps with visitors, but it doesn’t generally produce the type of traffic that you’re looking for. Of course you’ll get the few readers that actually appreciate what you’ve written and will come back again and again, but most people are just after the credits from Entrecard etc.
Eh well. Such is life I suppose. Great post though.
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Lyndi — I’m seeing more stumble traffic too as well as general search engine traffic which is a real plus as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been reading more and more lately that Google penalizes sites with very high bounce rates unless they are some form of encyclopedia or reference site as then it’s expected that the visitor comes, sees what they want and then leaves. Our sites have more “explorable” content that should draw readers in to looking at more than just the landing page.
Stefan — thanks for joining in the conversation! I greatly appreciate your comment and agree with you 100% that “nice blog” or “interesting article” are bordering on spam comments. Depending upon what it says exactly and how many links the comment author includes, I may or may not consign those to spam. If you’ve ever read any of my comments just about anywhere, you know that I tend to write books, not just a paragraph or two. For those of you with photo blogs, I’ll stumble your photos before commenting usually.
Social networking sites are great for getting that initial push of visitors and if 2 out of 100 stick, well, you’re growing your base, so that’s good. The thing about Entrecard is that it encourages people to hurry away so they can complete that all-important 300th drop.
I know Graham TRIES to encourage people to leave comments and even instituted giving credits for rated comments through SezWho which was good as far as it went. He’s also encouraged us to Digg, Stumble and BuzzUp posts. Graham’s problem is that he doesn’t do enough testing of processes before putting them into place.
He would serve his community better if he would take a little time to build up a test community of bloggers who would take 4-6 weeks to test out his ideas before putting them out to the entire Entrecard community. I believe he could have avoided a lot of the bad feelings that have come from some of the more blundery things he’s put into place if he had tested before rolling them out.
I hope you come back this way again real soon!
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