How reviews affect the bounce / exit rate. Experiment

Site positions in the search are tied to various factors. These factors include bounce rate and exit rate. In the SEO world, there is an opinion that website reviews reduce bounce and exit rates, influence behavioral factors and increase conversion.

To check if this is the case, an experiment was carried out. It will be discussed below.

Bounce rate and exit rate

If these metrics are high enough, the pages for which they are calculated will not perform well. What is the difference between the two?

Output rate indicates the number of exits from the web resource. One page or several pages can participate in the counting of outputs.

Bounce rate shows the number of views on a particular page that was opened, but no interaction occurred.

Impact of reviews on behavioral factors: a hypothesis

Yandex and Google are equipped with counters that collect information about all web resources and their visitors. The collected data allows search engines to determine the wishes and requests of users to sites of different directions and niches.

The experiment will be carried out on the example of the Autoportal 100.ks.ua website. The user needs 3 seconds to find a vehicle repair company and fix its phone. The system takes this action for refusal and exit from the site. Consequently, bounce rates and exits rise and behavioral factors worsen. This negatively affects the position of the site.

BrightLocal research has shown that 88% of users study reviews before purchasing a particular product / service.

It turns out that in order to keep the user longer than 3 seconds and not cause a “refusal”, it is necessary to introduce reviews for the companies of the Autoportal 100.ks.ua.

Hypothesis: Having even one review can reduce the rate of bounce and exit from the site.

Is this so in practice? Check it out!

The Impact of Reviews on Bounce & Exit Rates: An Experiment

The experiment was launched on 05/10/2021. As part of the study, we took 246 pages of the Autoportal website 100.ks.ua (the whole resource has more than 15,000 pages). It’s important to note that those 246 pages had the worst bounce / exit rates.

Within a month, the employees of Autoportal 100.ks.ua asked the site’s clients to leave reviews for the companies whose services they used. As a result, each car service got 1–4 reviews on the site.

As a result, throughout the site (15 thousand pages):

yields decreased by 0.92%;
rejections increased by 2.58%.

Some statistics from the experiment (246 pages)

Dynamics of failures / exits:

the date	Refusal volume,%	Output volume,%
May 10, 2021	100	87.73
June 10, 2021	95.73	27.46

Result for the month:

Performance scale	Due to bounces, number of pages	Due to outputs, number of pages
Has improved	142	234
Has not changed	104	4
Worsened	0	eight

Thus, the reviews attracted the attention of customers and kept them on the site, which means that they reduced the percentage of bounces / exits from the pages.

Are you interested in the details? In the full report, you can study the dynamics of indicators in more detail.

conclusions

The positive dynamics of the numbers allows us to confidently assert that the presence of reviews influences the behavioral factor to some extent.

Having reviews provides important benefits:

forms the content of the page;
improves internal PF;
the page above is ranked with other variables being equal;
the page goes from static to dynamic (the latter have an advantage for robots).

And do not forget that the lack of reviews from other companies on the site (of which there are much more than 246 units under study) as a whole distorted the picture of the number of refusals / exits for the entire Autoportal 100.ks.ua.

Reviews are a separate tool for ranking a web resource, and you should definitely motivate users to leave them.

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Bounce rate and exit rate

Impact of reviews on behavioral factors: a hypothesis

The Impact of Reviews on Bounce & Exit Rates: An Experiment

Some statistics from the experiment (246 pages)

conclusions

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