Bounce rate:
Bounce rate is the internet marketing term which used in traffic analysis. It is the percentage of visitor who enters in the website and then leave website rather than continue to view other page than rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.
A high bounce rate can be a sign that your content is not targeted to the visitor’s wants and needs, but a high bounce rate can also be a positive indicator. Which it is depends on the answer to this question, “can you get value out of a single page visit?”
Uses of Bounce Rate
Having a high bounce rate can mean three things:
1. The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
2. Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
3. Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.
Reduce bounce rate of website
- Update your outdated content
Do you still have content on your website from 2001 telling people how to optimize their my space page? Yeah, you’ll want to fix that. Even in less extreme cases, it’s important to keep old high-traffic posts up to date to keep your bounce rate down.
Pro-tip: Do a site search in Google for ‘Site:yourwebsite.com YEAR’ like in the screenshot below to find all of the outdated content on your website that needs updating.
- Don’t use pop-ups… unless they’re exit-intent pop-ups
In general, pop-ups are awful for the user experience and should be avoided at all costs.
The only case where it’s (kind of) okay is when you’re using an exit-intent tool like Bounce Exchange or Opting Monster, which use mouse tracking technology to identify when a user is about to bounce, and then shows a popup to reduce the likelihood of this.
Larry Kim reduced Word Stream’s bounce rate from 69% to 40% by installing Bounce Exchange on their site, which he claims also improved his conversions.
While Bounce Exchange’s service is very expensive, there are many affordable alternatives like Optimonk and OptinMonster.
Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, which is why it’s important to write concisely and in short sentences.
- Check ‘double meaning’ keywords
One of my old clients sold laboratory space. I was thrilled one day when I got into the office and noticed they ranked #1 on Google for ‘labs for sale’.
I was less thrilled when I noticed the surge in traffic had a 94% bounce rate, and my client had been receiving telephone inquiries all day from people wanting Labradors.
When my friend Kevin Gibbons wrote a post on ’77 SES London Takeaways’, he noticed a spike in low-quality traffic every Friday and Saturday. Turns out he ranked page #1 for ‘London takeaways’.
Be mindful of where your traffic is coming from, and cull any sources that are completely irrelevant.
- Translate your site for international traffic
One of my current clients receives a lot of traffic from Israel, Japan, and China. Trouble is, his site was only available in English.
I decided to install WPML to translate his site into a few different languages. The result? His bounce rate for international traffic decreased from 81% to 44%.
- Make your site search more prominent
In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug explains how some people are search-orientated and these users will look for a search box as soon as they enter a site. Don’t make it difficult for users to search for what they’re looking for.
- Make your 404 page more useful
Google explicitly advises that your 404 error page should be useful in helping people find what they were looking for. They also advise using the enhanced 404 widget to include a search box on your 404 page.
Lots of broken links will cause a poor user experience, driving your bounce rates up. Using the Webmaster Tools crawl error report, or a scraper like Screaming Frog, identify all of the broken links on your site and fix as many of them as possible.
- Make all external links open in a new window
For blogs, it’s likely that a large portion of your bounces are coming from people clicking on external links in your posts.
If you’re using Word Press, there’s a plug-in that will automatically open all of your external links in a new tab. Otherwise, the easiest thing to do is to simply add target=”_blank” in all of your external links.
- Improve your page loading speed
57% of users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. I recently wrote a post on how I improved the loading speed of this site by 70.39% in 45 minutes. There are 22 tips in that post that will help you reduce loading times.
Internal links, like this one to our blog, keep people navigating around your website. Use them to reduce your bounce rate, and help users find what they’re looking for without searching.
- Improve your copy’s readability
The Flesch-Kincaid readability test determines how understandable your writing is for different comprehension levels. There are readability tests that you can use to identify your Flesch-Kincaid score. Alternatively, you can just use the formula as a guide.
The more readable your content, the better the user experience and the lower your bounce rate will be.
- Make your navigation intuitive
Simple navigation makes it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for, or at least get to a point where they can easily find out. Don’t try to be overly innovative with your navigation – like a supermarket, or a light switch, we prefer things to be how we expect them to be. Strange navigation is just a headache for your users.
A good design instills trust and makes navigation intuitive. People don’t spend much time on sites they don’t trust or find difficult to navigate. Make it easy for your visitors by having a great design to begin with. If you’re using Word Press, there’s a great list of beautiful responsive Word Press themes here.
- Make sure your website’s cross browser compatible
I recently noticed on one of my side projects that the bounce rate in IE and Safari was ~10% higher than that in Chrome. While this is not too unusual, I was curious to figure out why.
It turned out to be a browser compatibility issue. IE users were seeing a page with some broken CSS and HTML5 loading issues. Once fixed, the bounce rate decreased from 68% to 60%.
Make sure you’re running regular user tests and browser tests to check your visitors and reaching any roadblocks.
- Use an intelligent content recommendation plug-in
At the bottom of this post, you’ll see the YARRP (Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in) recommending a handful of related posts. You’ll also see that we’re using WP Popular Posts to display our best performing posts in the right-hand sidebar. Both of these plug-in reduce bounce rates while helping readers find your best content.
- Improving your copy writing
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, famously wrote, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
When you write, a relationship is formed with your reader. If you’re arrogant or write long paragraphs to transfer simple points, readers will bounce.
Investing in your copy writing skills will not only reduce your bounce rate, it’ll lift conversions, click through rates, and how much people enjoy reading your writing.
- Split up longer posts into chapters
I’m sure we’re all familiar with those ‘top 50’ posts where you have to click next to load the next page in the countdown. Initially, publishers used this technique to boost advert impressions (one visit became 50 impressions, instead of one). While you may not need to go quite this far, you can reduce your bounce rates by splitting your long posts into a series of shorter chapters.
- Make your website mobile responsive
As stats from Gomez reveal, mobile visitors have even less patience than desktop visitors. Ensure your website has a responsive design to provide mobile users with a great user experience.
SriRam Soft Solutions Pvt. Ltd. 