Reducing Bounce Rate

[mmuench]

I've had my website up for a little over a month and have run one month of ppc on Google. It took forever for my web host (not REW) to finally get the google tracking script into my code, but I've got a good two weeks worth of Google Analytics data to look at.

I'm seeing a very high bounce rate on both landing pages I've been using for my ppc campaign and I'd like some input as to what I can do to reduce it.

All of my ads advertise a free home search and the landing page for almost all ads is my MLS search page, which requires no registration. Up until last week I was experimenting with using my home page as a landing page for generic "mytown real estate" keywords, but essentially all of my adds now land directly on my MLS search page.

The bounce rates I'm seeing are as follows:

Main Page - 40%

MLS - 77.78%

Now it makes since that if the ad promises a free MLS search and then lands visitors on my main page that the majority would then follow the link to the MLS search page.

What I need to figure out is why nearly 78% of visitors who land directly on my MLS Search page are bouncing.

Here is my MLS landing page

Any suggestions of what I could change to decrease my bounce rate?

[Ryan Ward]

Mike,

You might consider using seperate ads for individual communities and using those community pages as the landing page with an easy link to your MLS page. Read through some of the recent threads and you will find lots of good tips from agents with much more experience and expertise in PPC than me.

Ryan

[RonnieG]

If you don't create a community specific landing page for each community, at least list the main communities you advertise for and serve at the top of the search page. Users want to see that the page they have been sent to is specifically for the areas they want to search in. You also need to have the specific keywords that are in your AdWords ad group(s) on the landing page, and also in your landing page's description tag, and at least a few of the keywords/communities in the Title tag. In addition to lower bounce rates, these things should all improve your AdWords Quality Score, which should reduce your average cost per click once Google recognizes the improvements to the landing page. You may see this effect as better ad positioning as well as lower CPC.