Unique Visitors?

If you cba to read that:

It's an individual visiting your site. Page views and Unique Hits are different because a Unique is a new IP sending a request to your site.

And it's good for a start, 1,000 is always better :lol:
 
Jay™ said:
If you cba to read that:

It's an individual visiting your site. Page views and Unique Hits are different because a Unique is a new IP sending a request to your site.

And it's good for a start, 1,000 is always better :lol:

Got 14 now. :great:

Well done on 1k. :cheer:
 
ive got nearly 700 since i switched to xenforo 5 days ago 🙂
 
what do you think should be a decent bounce rate for most forums?
 
The Product Forum said:
what do you think should be a decent bounce rate for most forums?
A decent bounce rate should be about 50% for forums because people are not expected to be browsing a whole topic for over 5 minutes. For websites, a good rate would be about 30%. But really, if you provide the right content, then bounce rate becomes irrelevant because you have the necessary traffic.
 
DavidL said:
The Product Forum said:
what do you think should be a decent bounce rate for most forums?
A decent bounce rate should be about 50% for forums because people are not expected to be browsing a whole topic for over 5 minutes. For websites, a good rate would be about 30%. But really, if you provide the right content, then bounce rate becomes irrelevant because you have the necessary traffic.

Completely true. Once you start generating traffic in excess, your bounce rate becomes completely pointless because you're getting targetted traffic (in theory).
 
Thanks for the advice. Our bounce rate is currrently around 48% and we are seeing 45% of our traffic is new visitors, should I hope to see the new visitors % decrease as people start to become regulars?
 
Bounce rate becomes irrelevant? It's always relevant. How else are you supposed to measure how effective your conversion rate is continuously alongside page-views per visit, longevity, and returning visits? Even for successful FTSE 500 websites it is taken into account. It's especially useful for e-commerce sites or forums attached with a type system to be compared with product conversion. A forum should have an extremely low bounce rate anyway due to visitors staying within the site for a long period of time.


The Product Forum said:
Thanks for the advice. Our bounce rate is currrently around 48% and we are seeing 45% of our traffic is new visitors, should I hope to see the new visitors % decrease as people start to become regulars?
Not necessarily, and you shouldn't hope your new visitors drop. It means fresh traffic and fresh conversation should they register an account. Should they not be converting (by creating an account and becoming active) then you have a problem.
 
Rich Edmonds said:
Bounce rate becomes irrelevant? It's always relevant. How else are you supposed to measure how effective your conversion rate is continuously alongside page-views per visit, longevity, and returning visits? Even for successful FTSE 500 websites it is taken into account. It's especially useful for e-commerce sites or forums attached with a type system to be compared with product conversion. A forum should have an extremely low bounce rate anyway due to visitors staying within the site for a long period of time.
Not my point at all. For a guest, if you have one page which has all information needed, then it would acceptable to have a high bounce rate because what you've done is provide assurance to a reader that you can provide relevant information. They need not visit other pages as what they've come to your site and looked for is there. If they continue then it's a bonus, but if not, why complain about providing people with relevant information? They may come back after they've found their answer and may click on ads or whatever, but as long as your site is remembered, a high or low bounce rate, becomes irrelevant.

Bounce rate can also be an inaccurate tool to measure a site's effectiveness. I only need to change tabs and work on something else and bounce rate is now inaccurate. It may seem people are consistently on the same site for 4 hours, but are they really? Chances are they are not and are using other sites at the same time.
 
DavidL said:
Not my point at all. For a guest, if you have one page which has all information needed, then it would acceptable to have a high bounce rate because what you've done is provide assurance to a reader that you can provide relevant information. They need not visit other pages as what they've come to your site and looked for is there. If they continue then it's a bonus, but if not, why complain about providing people with relevant information? They may come back after they've found their answer and may click on ads or whatever, but as long as your site is remembered, a high or low bounce rate, becomes irrelevant.

Bounce rate can also be an inaccurate tool to measure a site's effectiveness. I only need to change tabs and work on something else and bounce rate is now inaccurate. It may seem people are consistently on the same site for 4 hours, but are they really? Chances are they are not and are using other sites at the same time.
Was mainly at Jay with the pointless comment, not so directed at you, sir. But for the majority of forums, topics don't rank when compared to a landing page from a website, which ensures that visitors look around and it's enticing for someone entering a community because they are more likely to visit other areas of the site through being intrigued with related posts etc. The bounce rate on forums should always be relevant, it's the difference between someone going through topics and closing the session, and reading through the threads, registering an account and then posting content in a few areas.

For opening new tabs, the emphasis isn't as strong when compared to the other variables that are taken into calculating the bounce rate (which of course is inaccurate due to Google Analytics being JS), and you opening a new tab wont necessarily be considered a bounce, due to impossible prediction as to the reason of the visitor opening that new tab. He (or she) could be an active user and is simply finding a source to back a post or is uploading an image to post etc. and would return to the forum tab in due time.

Even if the site is known and bookmarked, the bounce rate (along with CTR, exit pages, time on site and pretty much all the data that can be provided to website owners) is relevant. It's just how you use the data, what you understand about the data, and how you can use the numbers to improve sections of your site (or forum in this instance). I will always keep an eye on my bounce rate, then I compare it to the average page view count for each visitor, as well as looking into which page led to an exit. If a thread has a high exit count for visitors and the bounce rate is relatively high for that day for the majority of visitors, I will check the thread in question to try add content in a reply, or read through and attempt to figure reason as to why they would leave in quick session - of course, like you rightfully said, they could simply locate the information they desire, bookmark the site/page and leave.

I'm not shooting you down, I just strongly protect my bounce rate 😛
 
I guess when someone types in a question in Google, chances are someone has asked that in a forum. When that guest looks at the answer/replies and may or may not find it, they will probably leave the site because they have or have not satisfactorily found their answer.

I see where you're going though. I was stressing that once the visitor's purpose has been satisfied, looking at bounce rate may not be the thing you want to look at (hence it becoming irrelevant in comparison to other things). You'd probably want some data on exit clicks and if they have clicked ads because they have found a good source.
 
I get 500 - 1k uniques per month.
And I don't even have a site running there....
Only coming soon image...
 
DavidL said:
I guess when someone types in a question in Google, chances are someone has asked that in a forum. When that guest looks at the answer/replies and may or may not find it, they will probably leave the site because they have or have not satisfactorily found their answer.

I see where you're going though. I was stressing that once the visitor's purpose has been satisfied, looking at bounce rate may not be the thing you want to look at (hence it becoming irrelevant in comparison to other things). You'd probably want some data on exit clicks and if they have clicked ads because they have found a good source.
I see, now I realise what you meant first time round. Definitely in that situation bounce rate would be useless on its own, but I never use it without analysing other data too so I guess it depends on how the owner uses the numbers from Analytics, right?


Zaborg said:
I get 500 - 1k uniques per month.
And I don't even have a site running there....
Only coming soon image...
Are you linking to it from other websites?
 
Yes I did. Last year when I had a forum.
And those links are still generating traffic, lol.
 
Zaborg said:
Yes I did. Last year when I had a forum.
And those links are still generating traffic, lol.

Where are those links from???!
 
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