Did you know that an average Retail website have 20-40% bounces?
Did you know that Web Portals like MSN, Yahoo Groups have 10-30% bounces?
And websites with simple landing pages with one call to action such as subscribe or add to cart have 70-90% bounce?
Service websites have an average 10-30% bounces.
Lead Generation websites (services for sale) normally have a boounce of 30-50%
Well what does this bounce rate means to you?
Google Analytics define bounce rate as – The percenttage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is the measure of visitis quality and a a high bounce rate generally indicates that the websites landing pages are not relevant to your visitors.
A simple equation to find out bounce rate is dividing the total number of visits viewing one page only by Total entried to the page.
How do visitors bounce from your site?
- By clicking on a link to a page on a different website
- By clicking the “back” button to leave the site
- By closing an open window or tab site
- By typing a new URL
- By Session time out
Also if you have a subdomain, the visits to your subdomain will be counted as someone leaving your site, and thus incorrectly increase your websites average bounce rate.
How can you improve bounce rate?
Before going to the tips to improve bounce rate, I would like to discuss some factors that affects the bounce rate.
- If you have Pop-up advertisements, surveys, music, or auto play streaming videos – I have found many cases where these scenarios leading to high bounce rate. Nobody loves Pop-up ads. Nobody loves to fill up surveys when they land on a page. Nobody loves shouts or musics or videos auto played. If you have any of these, count on it, it can be a reason for high bounce rate.
- Some Organic Search Engine Rankings can increase your websites bounce rate. Imagine a page in your website which is ranking high for an irrelevant keyword. When user land on these kind of pages, they bounce back simply because the content on the page is not of their interest.
- Bounce rate is depended on the type of audience. If you pitch or sell the wrong type of product to the wrong market, you will get a high bounce rate. You need to make sure you rank to the right audience search query.
- Landing page design is another reason for high bounce rate. If you have a poor landing page, you can have a high bounce rate.
- Advertisement on page and poor landing page messages are yet another reason for high bounce rate. Nobody loves to land on a page filled with Advertisements. You also need to make sure your key texts on the landing page is optimized for the target audience.
- Load time of the pages is of course a top reason for high bounce rate. The longer the page load time, higher the bounce rate is.
Now here are some tips to improve bounce rate.
- Top Position for Branded Keywords – You need to maintain top ranking for your branded terms. Having ranked this way will make sure your user find the right info on your page, because they are searching with your branded terms
- Provide Relevant Web Content – Your chances of impressing your website visitor is higher when you have the right content. You need to understand that your home page is not your page which need to come up for all your search keywords. Each keywords you optimize need to have its on highly relevant landing pages. You need to create landing pages tailored to each keyword and ad copy that you run so that your visitors can find what was promised on their click action.
- Build a clear navigation path/menu – When you design your website, you need to have a clear understanding on how you want to take the visitors to complete your website goal. Nobody will be as patient as you to find the navigation path. Having a clear navigation path can reduce the bounce rate. This is tested over and again. It works.
- Link to a glossary page that defines industry terms – If your website speaks lot of industrial jargon, your visitors may get lost. All visitors may not be as smart as you are. If your website speaks lot of jargon, please make sure you link it to a glossary page which defines the terms. This adds lot of clarity.
- Speed up page load using Google Page Speed Tools – There is no good tool as the Google page load speed tool. Make sure your website is tested and optimized for ideal load speed.
- Get rid of pop-up ads – Be honest. Do you like pop-ads while you surfing? No !!!. So does your visitors, so lets not use it.
- Reduce External Links (or have them open in a new window) – It is as simple as it..
