High bounce rate on affiliate portal

[iwebdevnl]

Hi everyone,

I own several affiliate websites and i have a really high bounce percentage(61%) and a high exit rate(78,45%). But i don't know the exact meaning of both words:

At the homepage of my website people have the possibility to directly click on several banners, so they then going to another website via the affiliate-link, lots of people click these links. So i was wondering is this the reason why my exit rate en high bounce percentage is that high, or could it have another reason?

Thank you,

[vforvinnie]

Perfectly said.  I did this, as well as create redirects for all my affiliate links (to mask the URLs).  So now visitors will click site.com/order55.php which redirects to the affiliate link.  So I can check all of the traffic to the order.php pages, but also see events/goals in my analytics.

This is a great answer and a great post.  Lots of affiliates run into this problem and have no idea what a good bounce rate might be in their industry, so could possibly assume something in the 70's is good.

Cheers,

Vinnie

[intSchools]

A bounce is when a visitor leaves immediately after entering your site. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without visiting another page.

Exit rate is the percentage of people who leave the site when on that page. For example, this could be the thank you page of a contact form or the confirmation page of an eCommerce site.

The reason you suggested would indeed give a high bounce and exit rate as people would be leaving your site having viewed that page. Usually high bounce and exit rates are bad but in your case they may be good as you want visitors to leave and go onto the affiliate site.

I would recommend setting up event tracking in Analytics so that you can measure the performance of the links and analyse the click rates etc.

Hope this helps.