What is a Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is quite a famous metric that is widely used to describe the quality of a specific page on a website. There are a lot of different definitions for bounce rate. According to Google Analytics, bounce rate is:
“single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server”
In simple words, the term refers to the number of single-page visits by the visitors of your website, which means this particular percentage of people who visited your website did absolutely nothing on the page they viewed. They didn’t visit a second page, click on an internal link, or click on a menu item. Measured in percentage, rates of bouncing are widely used to measure the performance of websites, specific landing or entry pages, marketing campaigns, and emails.
Measuring Bounce Rate
In general, the rate of bounces on your website can be measured in two different ways: one is by determining the total number of people visiting your website on a particular entry page but leave before exploring anything, and the second way is to find out which visitors “bounce” after just a brief period of time, say five seconds. A visitor usually bounces when they do not feel engaged with the landing page and their visit turns out to be a single-page visit.
Single Pages vs. Websites
The calculation of the rates for single pages and websites is done differently. In the case of a single page, you can determine the bounce rate by dividing the number of visitors to have bounced after visiting the page by the overall number of visitors to have entered the page. On the other hand, the rate of a whole website can be calculated by dividing the number of visitors to have bounced after entering a single page by the total number of visitors to the website. In most cases, using both these calculations together is known to be the most effective method in analyzing your website.
The lower the percentage of your website’s bounce rate, the more relevant and effective it is. However, if your website’s bounce rate exceeds 50%, it needs a proper set of relevant content and features, which means you need to focus on the research and development of your website. In this case, you can determine the adjustments to be made to make your website more appealing to visitors only by following the trial and error method.
Understand the Purpose
When it comes to understanding your bounce rate, you should keep in mind that the metric’s importance depends on the purpose of a page. For instance, if a particular page is mainly there to provide information, then a high bounce rate for that page isn’t really an issue, because people have visited the page for that information, received it, and close the page.
However, if a page’s purpose in to make visitors engage with your site, then it should have a low bounce rate. For instance, if the main aim of a page is to have visitors follow you on social media and the page seems to have a high bounce rate, then you need to work on optimizing the page, say by adding a call-to-action feature.
Conversion
From conversion point of view, bounce rate is certainly a metric that can be used to measure your success. For example, let’s say you have changed the content on a specific page of your website hoping to obtain better conversion rates; however, if you notice that the bounce rate of the page has increased after the change, then it is more likely that the change you have made is wrong.
To increase conversion and reduce bounce rates, one easy step you can follow is monitor the bounce rates of some of your most crowd-pleasing pages, compare them with those that have high bounce rates, and make changes accordingly. You can also analyze the sources of traffic to your website to determine the bounce rate and work on conversions.
Reducing Bounce Rate
Reducing your bounce rate is important to improve conversions. Listed below are some efficient ways to reduce bounce rates of your website and specific pages:
- Improve the readability of your content: Make your content legible and readable. Avoid chunk paragraphs of text and focus on formatting to make the content easy to read; this helps deliver better user experience.
- Reduce page load time: It is a fact that issues can arise even before users are able to read your content, and the most prominent of them all is slower page load times. As long as your page loading time is high, so will be your bounce rate.
- Attract relevant audience: In addition to having relevant content and keywords, it is equally vital to target the right audience to visit your site. Concentrate on attracting a specific group of people, rather than a broader target group.
- Optimize your CTA: A clear call-to-action feature that doesn’t take more than 3 seconds for visitors to see is the next best way to reduce your bounce rate. Your CTA should be highly compelling, making users want to click and be where you want them.
- Avoid irrelevant popups: Irrelevant popups are annoying – it’s that simple!
As you would be aware, visitors of your website are valuable to your business, regardless of whether you sell products and/or services or have a blog. Your goals should be to optimize user experience so that you can avoid high bounce rates.
