Bounce rate for search page?

[Ryan Ward]

I just started getting traffic to my website this week so it will be a couple of weeks before I get enough data, but, my bounce rate seems high as the rest om my site is about 25-30%. My search homes page is 63% I was curious if this is unreasonably high. There is no registration.

Thanks

[Sam Chapman]

The bounce rate for my top 10 pages sincew Feb. 1 ranges from 24% to 90% for a short sale article.

[RESteve]

Is your analytics program able to see what keywords your users are searching to hit your search page? This is organic or PPC?

[Sam Dodd]

Your search pages should be high. The reason being is they see all the homes and move onto the next site or quit looking.

People often forget the #1 reason people go to a real estate website is to see listings.

[RESteve]

If the #1 reason people go to a real estate website is to see listing, why would a search listings page have a high bounce rate?

[RonnieG]

Many new visitors may look for homes, and discover that the market is beyond their means. The higher the average sales prices are, the higher the bounce rate will be. Keep in mind that if your home search page is a framed or IFramed IDX search, it may look like a bounce, but they may actually be on that same page for quite a while, and they may just never want or need to go to another page on the site, especially if they find they can't afford what they are looking for in your market.

[RESteve]

Thanks Ron, that lead to an Aha! for my particular situation. So framed IDX solutions register as a bounce; good to know.

[RonnieG]

Well, that's not exactly what I said. They CAN register as a bounce, if they happen to be the only page a visitor uses while they are at your site. If you have stats that show time spent on each page, as well as page navigation stats, such as what P2A Ultrastats shows, you may be able to see that some visitors may spend many minutes on your Iframed home search page, and some may spend only a few seconds. The ones that spend just a few seconds are true bounces. The ones that spend minutes really are searching, and may not need to go to another page, especially if they are repeat visitors.

[kid disco]

It makes total sense for a home search page to have a high bounce rate. Like CedarCityRealtor mentioned above, in general, your visitor's primary intention is probably to search for homes. Once they are finished, they exit. Why would they look at any other page on your site?

As RonnieG mentioned, a better metric to analyze for your home search page may be the amount of time spent on it.

If you are using Google Analytics, you can also set up goals and funnels to define and track navigation and conversions.

[RESteve]

I've been monitoring my sites search page bounce rates. It's pretty low I'd say at 34%, and the average visitor stays over 2 minutes. I'm assuming that these is good for stats for a framed IDX solution, given I don't have the ability to track the stats as accurately as my local pages.

Would anyone agree?