Mr Bounce and the SEO experts

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker


We were privy to an interesting discussion on SEO and CPC advertising recently. A business owner had a bounce rate of around 50% on their paid for clicks and was quite happy with such a rate. Their previous agency had told them that 50% was the best they could hope for. Now anyone telling their clients that they should be hoping for success must walk with bowed legs when they present their invoices (bolas grandes). Anything that has a 50% chance of happening is not good odds - it's pure chance. Let’s put that 50% success rate into perspective:

Whatever you are bidding for each search term, you are actually paying double for each visitor who explores your site.

People are no more likely to visit a second page of your website than if they were using a coin toss to decide whether they stay or go. How many purchasing decisions do you base on a coin toss?

Finding out why people bounce from your home page is not straightforward. It could be that they find all the information they need there on one page. It might be that they simply hate the look of your site or that your site shares a similar name to another business (the one they were actually looking for) or any other number of reasons. What struck us about the cases in question is that they had been advised to ‘cover all bases’ by sponsoring searches for terms that were distant cousins to their what their business actually offers. The problem with this strategy is that the first thing many visitors to your website will experience is disappointment. Imagine if half the items you bought in the supermarket contained something other than what was promised on the box. I’m looking for X and you offer Y. Yes, someone might discover that they prefer the taste of Y compared to the X they were looking for but does that sound like an effective way to attract new customers?

People no longer search for generic terms. Type ‘used cars’ into Google and you get nearly 250 billion results. Type ‘used cars uk’ and you reduce this to 78 billion. Change it to ‘used cars west yorkshire’ and you’re down to 435,000. Most of us know this yet there are still ‘SEO consultants’ out there advising people to part money for search terms that haven’t got a hope in hell of winning them any new business.

Unlike John Wanamaker, anyone using Google Adwords can quite easily discover which part of their (online) advertising budget isn’t working and make it work. If you’d like to find out how, give us a call on 01484 689 400 and we'll be happy to demonstrate what can be achieved online.

How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns?

How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns?

Spam? I'd rather eat dog food

Above: Ted. A dog who prefers crisps to Spam



How hungry would you have to be before you tucked into a bowl of dog food? What about a tin of Spam? John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch carried out an experiment to see if people could tell the difference between dog food and pâté based purely on taste. In a double blind taste test, volunteers were presented with five dishes all prepared in a food mixer to have the same consistency, chilled and then served with a parsley garnish and a side of crackers. The five dishes were organic dog food, duck liver mousse, supermarket liverwurst, pork liver pâté and good old Spam.

Despite the participants consistently rating the dog food as having the worst taste, Bohannon et al found that they were no better at identifying the dog food than someone simply guessing. They suggested that people were so poor at predicting which dish was the dog food because they had been primed to expect dog food to taste better than it does. In other words, the worst tasting dish wouldn’t be the dog food. This is a good example of the power of suggestion, a corner stone of successful advertising.

Perhaps even more surprising though was that the aggregate ranking of dog food and Spam showed no statistical significance. So how does a product for which people show no significant preference for over dog food sell over 7 billion units across 41 countries? That’s the power of a strong brand.

Link to Bohannon et al's experiment