What does bounce rate really mean?
If you use Google Analytics for your website (if you don’t, I highly suggest that you do), you probably already know your page’s bounce rate. Although, if you are not familiar with this very important yet simple to understand tool, according to Google Analytics a websites bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left your sight from the entrance page (single-page viewers). It is calculated by taking the total number of visitors viewing one page only and dividing it by the total entries to the site through that page. It is a wonderful metric of how effective your landing pages are and is an easy indication that you may need to increase the quality of your entrance page. Most people who use Analytics know what bounce rate means. What they really want to know is; what is the average bounce rate for their industry? Well, let me show you in this convenient chart below.
How does your site’s bounce rate measure up to the average bounce rate?
A survey done by Anil Batra, VP of Business Consulting at iJento and a Web Analytics and Online Advertising Consultant, shows the following bounce rate averages for 5 popular industry categories, while the “other” category refers to social networking, online gaming, travel search engines, tool/utility, bank and training, customer support website
If your websites bounce rate is higher than these industry averages don’t worry! There are no absolute industry standards for bounce rates, as shown in the chart the range is from 3.24% to 85%. Everybody’s website is different and the number depends on many different factors such as pop-up ads, surveys, music, and streaming video, the search engine ranking of your page, and landing page design. The obvious good news is that all of these factors can be manipulated to lower your sites bounce rates eventually, it just takes some focus and a little bit of work. Another interesting part of the survey is the difference in bounce rates depending on how traffic is directed to websites, regarding paid and organic search.
As we can see from the chart, the bounce rates for paid search are higher in 3 out of the 5 categories with branding websites having by far the highest bounce rate. This is kind of alarming since you are paying for those visitors to get to your site, although this could be because the user came to your page and found exactly what they needed right away and left. Organic search bounce rates are much higher for news/media sites, most likely because those users were searching for a particular story, read it and left. While paid search users are sent to a landing page and are expected to look through a few pages until they find an interesting story. Again as mentioned above, every website is different so bounce rates obviously vary a lot. The important thing is to be aware of your sites bounce rates regarding how traffic is directed to your site and if it looks like your paid search rate is really high you might be wasting part of your budget.
How can you reduce your sites bounce rate?
1) Check your browser performance– Your websites developer may have built your site exclusively using Google Chrome. It is extremely important to check its performance in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Parts of your website may load much slower in these browsers compared to the browser your website was built on, if pages on your site load too slow users will find the information somewhere else.
2) Improve Load Times– I know pictures, music, and videos make your site look awesome and interesting, but you have to keep in mind that some users do not have a high-speed internet connection. If your site is loading slowly due to “extra” media, users may get antsy and leave your site.
3) Maintain top rankings for branded terms– Your websites branded terms are your bread and butter for paid search. The ranking of your website on search engines definitely affects your bounce rate. It is important to study your keywords and to maintain the top rankings for your sites branded keywords.
4) Provide relevant content– Users hate seeing landing pages that have nothing to do with what they’re searching for, it is kind of annoying and waste of time. Make sure you create landing pages that are tailored to the keywords and ads that you run so your visitors are not directed to a page that makes no sense.
5) Test different solutions– When making changes to your website make sure to do A/B and multi-variant testing to check how those changes affected your pages bounce rate. Even small changes such as a buttons color or the words you put on it can have an effect on that pages bounce rate.
To learn more about how to reduce your websites bounce rate check out Inc.com.
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-bounce-rate-image24054419
http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986
http://www.anilbatra.com/digitalmarketing/Typical%20Bounce%20Rates%20by%20Anil%20Batra.pdf
Bounce Rate Demystified – Web Analytics, Behavioral Targeting and Optimization by Anil Batra http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/bounce-rate-demystified.html#ixzz1rh3Wrzm9
http://www.inc.com/guides/2011/01/how-to-reduce-your-website-bounce-rate.html
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