Finding High-Bounce-Rate Keywords in AdWords

One of the big problems we see with clients’ campaigns is that they have keywords (or groups, or whole campaigns) that have excessively high bounce rates. Those should be taken out behind the barn and shot, but how do you separate the bad ones from the good ones? Analytics makes it easy!

Finding High Bounce Rate Keywords

Here’s how:

1. Connect your AdWords account with your Analytics account.
2. Wait until you have a bit of history in Analytics, at least 10-20 clicks on the keywords/groups you’re checking.
3. Log in to Analytics.
4. Click into the ‘Traffic Sources’ section in the menu at the left.
5. Click into the AdWords section. If nothing is shown here, you haven’t connected AdWords and Analytics correctly.
6. Choose the campaign you’re interested in.

Now you’re looking at how that campaign’s ad groups have performed on your site. One of the questions we get often is “what’s a high bounce rate?” Unfortunately, this depends on your site, your visitors, your market, etc. But Analytics gives you a great way to see how AdWords traffic compares with average traffic.

On your Analytics page, find the ‘Views:’ selector on the right side. It defaults to ‘Table’, but the option we want is ‘Comparison’. Click it and you’ll see how your ad groups’ visits compare with average. This isn’t terribly useful, but click the pulldown next to ‘compared to site average’ and select ‘Bounce Rate’.

Now you can see your bounce rate for each ad group relative to your average bounce rate for the site. Ad Groups that are bouncing higher than average need to be examined for problem keywords or ad text.

Another way to slice the data is to ignore campaigns and groups, and instead focus on Keywords. Click ‘Keywords’ on the left side under ‘Traffic Sources’, then click the ‘paid’ link below the graph. Now you’re looking at just the keywords you paid for via AdWords.

Again, use the ‘Comparison’ link over on the right side, then pick ‘Bounce Rate’ in the pulldown next to ‘compared to site average’, and you’ll see which keywords are bouncing a lot. Pause those in AdWords and stop spending money for clicks on keywords that aren’t performing!