Why does traffic from online advertising bounce? Think about it: you've done the same thing many times. You've searched on a search engine, clicked on a result, then left that page less than ten seconds after you arrived. You did that again and again until you found what you were looking for. You might easily have left a trail of bounces on the server logs of a dozen websites, for a dozen website owners to worry over.

Why did you keep leaving? Because you weren't finding what you were looking for on those websites within the first ten to thirty seconds of arriving. Experience had taught you that you'd find what you were looking for faster clicking on other search results, one of which was bound to have what you were looking for, than sifting through the pages of a website that didn't look very promising from the start.

That's how everyone searches, and how everyone treats online advertising. You have to work with this behavior rather than against it.

So how do you keep online advertising traffic from bouncing? Think about why you bounced. What made you doubt that the website had what you were searching for? If you were using a search engine, you had searched on a keyword--let's say you searched on "small business website content." Without realizing it, you were scanning each page for the keyword, "small business website content," or something very close to it.

A website that talked about "small business web copy" might have been what you were looking for, but if you didn't know that "web copy" is just another term for "website content," you'd have hit the "back" button. You’d keep hitting the "back" button until you arrived at a page that had that keyword in the page title, page headings, and in the first few lines of the body, maybe in boldface to make it easier to find.

Of course, if you arrived at the page via a link from another website, you weren't looking for a search engine keyword. You were just looking (hoping) for something that had to do with what made you click on the link in the first place. If the page title and the first page heading resembled the text of the link you had clicked on, you'd feel like you had found what you were looking for--no worries about this being one of those pages that changed after the other site started linking to it.

But if the link promised no. 72 monkey wrenches, you'd feel let down if it brought you to the homepage of a hardware store. Experience tells you the store might have stopped selling no. 72 monkey wrenches long ago and never bothered updating its inbound links. Experience also tells you that even if the site does have what you're looking for, it may be more trouble than it's worth to find it. Why search through a website when search results from the entire world wide web are just a click of the "back" button away?