31 Mar New Interactive Marketing Definition Needed for Old School Bounce Rates?

We’ve been looking at amazingly low bounce rates on landing pages for a particular campaign that we are working on.

The bounce rate is below 15% on a site with the following:

• NO Top level or side navigation elements
• 6 page footer elements, including 4 boring items related to legal, privacy, spam, and terms and conditions of the site
• 4 contextual calls to a particular action
• CHAT

Overall, the page design is very clean and conducive to a low bounce rate already. However, I do believe that Active Chat is what is bringing down the bounce rate. I will check analytics and determine objectively what the contribution is.

However, in a way, I felt a little cheated in typical “bounce rate” metrics because in the old school of analtyics, the page spoke for itself and by itself. Now, automated widgets and sticky applications, such as chat, can and do move the needle of site visitor engagement towards the positive.

So in our progressing world of interactive marketing, I think that it is imperative that our definitions grow, our perceptions evolve, and we learn that engagement via multiple ways on a page can really impact the bottom line. It is the difference of being in a desert and seeing the same old sand, or actually seeing a cool mirage widget and being lured to follow. All is fair right?

Maybe we can form a new Interactive Marketing engagement metric related to bounce with active widgets vs. those “older” school bounce rates without widgets.

Could the old meaning of “bounce” be changed with increasing engagement on a page without true value of next step conversions?

What do you think?