What is pogo-sticking?
Pogo-sticking is the back-and-forth a person does when search results keep failing them. Click the first result, it is not what they wanted, back to Google. Click the second, still not it, back again. Each hop between the results page and a site is a pogo stick bounce. It is distinct from a plain bounce, where someone lands on a page and leaves: a bounce can mean the visitor got their answer and left satisfied. A pogo stick means they did not, and went looking elsewhere.
The term comes from the SEO industry rather than from Google, and it describes the one behavior a search engine would most like to eliminate. A results page people keep returning to is a results page that got the ranking wrong, and the engine can see it happen.
Why it matters
Why pogo-sticking matters
Whether or not it is a direct ranking factor, and Google has said it is not used that way, pogo-sticking is the most honest diagnostic a page can get. It means the page won the click, so the title and snippet did their job, and then lost the visitor within seconds, so the page did not. Something between the promise in the result and the reality of the page is broken.
Usually that something is one of a few things: the page does not actually address the query, the answer is buried under an introduction and three ads, the page loads slowly or badly on a phone, or a pop-up arrives before the content does. Each of those costs the brand a visitor it had already paid for, in effort or in money, to attract.
In practice
How pogo-sticking works in practice
- 01
You cannot see pogo-sticking directly in your analytics, because the return trip happens on Google's page. What you can see are the symptoms: a landing page with a healthy click-through rate in Search Console, a short average engagement time in Google Analytics and a low share of engaged sessions, especially from search traffic. Pages showing that pattern are the candidates.
- 02
The fix is to re-read the page as the searcher. Look at the query it ranks for, the title and description Google shows, and then the first screen of the page on a phone. If the answer is not visible almost immediately, move it up. Cut the preamble, lead with the answer, keep the depth below it for the people who want it, and make sure the page loads before the visitor's patience runs out.
Watch out
What people get wrong about pogo-sticking
Confusing it with bounce rate. A glossary page that answers the question in the first paragraph will have a high bounce rate and almost no pogo-sticking: people got what they came for. A page with a low bounce rate can still be pogo-sticking if the few people who stay are not the ones who came from search.
The other error is trying to fix it with tricks: breaking the back button, trapping the visitor in a pop-up, hiding the exit. Nothing sends someone back to the results faster, and nothing does more damage to how they feel about the brand.
