Pogo Sticking Vs Bounce Rate And #1 Tricks To Improve Them

If you are a webmaster you must become familiar with pogo sticking and bounce rate, these two entities are often confusing.

That’s why I have decided to dedicate an entire article explaining what they are so that you won’t forget it.

I will also tell you what are some advanced tricks you can use to improve the values of pogo sticking and bounce rate.

These two entities need to be considered while looking at your SEO analytics and when you are trying to create a more effective SEO plan.

In this blog, we are going to talk about SEO, affiliate marketing and how to make money online. All of these articles in the SEO section will help you make a lot of money online.

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Table of Contents

What Are Pogo Sticking And Bounce Rate

Pogo sticking and bounce rate are 2 metrics that Google takes into account when ranking websites.

From Google Analytics you can figure out the bounce rate of your website, this can be a very accurate number. Meanwhile to measure the pogo sticking is harder.

These two metrics are both giving an idea to Google if your website is great or not. And here are the definitions you must understand before going any further.

Pogo Sticking: It is considered pogo sticking each time that you search for something on google, click one of the results and immediately bounce back and click on another result.
Bounce rate: Will be considered bounce rate when you search for something on Google, click on one of the results and not interacting with any other page of that website.

They are both not considered SEO factors but they are definitely considered ranking factors. You have no control over them but you can try to improve them.

You might think that pogo sticking and bounce rate are the same thing but even though they are both bad stuff pogo sticking is the worst.

If you search for something and land on a very cool website, you read the whole page for 1 hour or more but you do not go anywhere else on that website it will be considered a bounce.

The lower is the percentage of your bounce rate the better it is.

How To Measure Pogo Sticking And Bounce Rate

Let’s start with the bounce rate which is easier to measure. If you go to your google analytics, you will be able to see the bounce rate of your site from the homepage.

This value is most of the time not that accurate since it takes into account also the returning visitors.

If a visitor returns to your website Google knows it and if they are not interacting with any other part of your site it will be not considered a bounce since the user is a returning user.

To see the correct value of your site bounce rate we need to add a segment. Go to:

Google Analytics ⇒ Audience ⇒ Overview ⇒ Look at the bounce rate ⇒ Add segment ⇒ New Users ⇒ Look at the bounce rate again.

You can look at the GIF below.

For the pogo sticking instead, there is no value on Google Analytics but you can use a simple trick to measure it.

What I usually do is to go to:

Google Analytics ⇒ Behaviour ⇒ All pages ⇒ Advanced ⇒ Add ‘avg. time on page‘⇒ Set it to ‘less than 5‘⇒ Check how much traffic there is on those pages.

If I have a lot of pages where the avg time on page is less than 5 seconds I consider it as pogo sticking.

As we can see in the GIF above, take a closer look at the pageviews of those pages with really low ‘avg time on page’.

If like in my case there are only a few pageviews it is not a big deal, and all is good. You need to get scared if you have pages with hundreds of pageviews and avg time on page less than 5 seconds.

Tips To Reduce Your Websites Pogo Sticking

create titles and meta tags related to the content you have on that page.
avoid pop-ups and ads.
put some eye-catching something on the pages where you have high pogo sticking.
improve the website loading speed.
avoid creating spammy and ugly pages.

You can also read how to quantify the pogo sticking here, this is a more advanced technique. And you can also read more stuff here. Also recommended is to watch this video from MOZ.

Tips To Reduce Your Websites Bounce Rates

try to make your website usable and nice looking.
create several calls to actions and engaging buttons that people could click.
put several internal links to other articles and content of your site.
put videos and awesome GIFs or images.
make your page readable.

You can also read an awesome article about this topic here.

How To Reduce Those Metrics Explained

I have listed above some tips that would definitely help you reduce those values. Click To Tweet

Your goal should be to have a bounce rate at least lower than 70% or less.

The first thing you should do that is in your power is to make your website blazing fast. Here is a tutorial on how to optimize WordPress speed to the max.

TUTORIAL TO SPEED UP WORDPRESS

You need to use Yoast SEO and create title and meta tags that are related to your content so that you can improve your CTR ( click through rate ) and eventually lower your pogo sticking.

Try to avoid pop-ups, intrusive ads, videos that are autoloading and spammy stuff that loads and opens all over the page. This will increase the chances that the visitor is not going to bounce back.

Make your website usable, AMP friendly, responsive and easy to figure out and add internal links to other pages. When someone reads your article if they are clicking a link to another page on your site the bounce rate will be not considered. This is your goal, add also call to action and buttons that invite to click.

Add media files, tutorials videos, GIFs and make it nice looking and sharable.

If you have patience you can also install a live chat support app like tawk.to so that you can interact with your visitors and direct them into another page.

Conclusions

If you want to rank on Google you should study SEO and become a Google Analytics genius. Something easy to understand is CTR, bounce rate and pogo sticking.

While you can get an accurate value of your sites to bounce rates, you can not actually measure the pogo-sticking which is actually worse than the bounce rate.

Having a low bounce rate, preferably lower than 70% or even less is something you should aim at when analyzing your website SEO.

Something you need to take care of immediately is your website speed and the relation between titles and meta tags to your content.

You have total and immediate control over these factors and they will decrease your bounce rate for sure.

I gave you other tips and things you should avoid but still, every case is totally different and you need an analytic mind to figure out the best way to escape those problems on your site.