Personally I think a visitor stays on site for 5 minutes reading the info they were looking for, and bounces, it is far better than someone skimming through 10 pages for 60 seconds total.

Furthermore, having the sidebar (not your main content) on the right makes it feel more like a reference place. For example, where you might look to get more information on the author, or a rolling news feed, etc. Anyone else see a certain kind of logic to my reasoning?

I’m looking at several different A/B testing platforms to help us with this initiative and it’s nice to see that you can measure engagement rate with your tool. So many A/B testing tools are focused on specific goals the user much reach, that’s great for an e-commerce site but as an online publication we don’t define our goals the same way and it’s refreshing to see you that you offer engagement as a goal.

Thanks for this post.

It would interesting to be able to test against something like that. No, it’s not a feature request. Just food for thought.

I totally agree that bounce rate is overrated. Better metrics are conversion rate, which for a blog could be subscriptions to RSS and comments on a post. Your idea of reading the full post can also make a powerful conversion goal!

-Paras

A bounce rate of 78% seems to be quite high for starters. But when I consider my own behaviour when reading blogs, it’s all about reading one post and leaving (or bouncing) when I’m done with it. So I guess that engagement or bounce rate is not the most suitable parameter to be tested for blogs – unless you test for some very intrusive alterations, like Smashing Magazine for example does by oftenly inserting a paragraph which is actually off-topic, beginning with “by the way:” and referring to other topics within their site.

Much more interesting for your blog might be, whether your post has been read up to the end and people didn’t bounce after reading the first paragraph. Hence one apparently more suitable parameter to be tested seems to be the time users spend on reading your post (which might be hard to measure).

Another interesting conversion goal might be to convince people to subscribe to your RSS-Feed or to follow your Twitter feed. I assume that tests for those parameters were much more telling.

Bounce rate oftentimes seems to be quite overrated.

Keep up your impressive work, Paras!

>(Though it may differ for you – you should A/B test it, it is really quite simple).

A/B testing results (even Jakob’s) should never be implemented without testing on your own site. Though A/B testing case studies give ideas and set a good benchmark using which you can compare your own results.