Bounce Rates & Publisher Monetization from Search

Bounce rate from natural search is a problem that has
plagued publishers for a long time. It’s one of the problems we’re working on solving
at Yieldbot.

Many pubs spend a great amount of time and effort working on
SEO to increase site visitors. The fruit of this labor is increased traffic to
pages relevant to the intent of the visitor (as best Google can infer). On the
face of it, this traffic would seem to be highly valuable. However, from my
experience bounce rates (defined as the percentage of visitors that click off
the site after landing on the page from Search) are typically between 70-90%.
This is an extraordinarily high number when you consider that the most famous
algorithm in the world has undertaken this keyword-content matching. As a
result, tons of intent driven traffic ends-up as remnant inventory and is poorly monetized.

Taking the perspective of the visitor (as all good
optimization should do) we are presented with two possible outcomes to optimize
against:

1)  
The visitor completes her goal of information
recovery or discovery on the landing page.

2)  
The visitor does not complete her goal and
continues searching.

Either case is ripe for optimization.

In the first scenario after the goal is completed visitors
are typically open to receiving new messaging. Here it’s possible to start a
new goal path. This is the brief no-intent window. This window can be highly valuable especially if it has some contextual
relevance to the goal that was just accomplished. A typical example is an offer
for a rental car after the visitor has booked a hotel room.

In the second scenario the query was most likely not
specific enough to deliver a relevant results page (or result) that matched one
of the three visitor goals (primary, secondary, latent). This presents the opportunity for ad matching to deliver
alternate goal paths that could be more relevant than the underlying content.
Since it is intent driven traffic, success here should have a high transactional
value if we can solve the matching problem. To see how this might be possible
one only has to look at the search engine result page (SERP) itself where often
times the ads are more relevant than the content (result set). We all at one
time have done a search and clicked on an ad.

Still, nearly all publisher landing pages from SEO are dead
ends or Google boomerangs. Partly because publishers have not thought of these internal pages as landing pages or treated them the way eCommerce sites do.  It is possible to match display ads and offers on landing closer the goals of the visitor than the underlying content. But as we seen with
search, the only way to do this is by having the ad matching and delivery
system woven into the experience. That’s what we’ve built.