The bounce rate for your website is an extremely important number to know since it lets you know how many visitors “bounce” away after landing on your site. In other words, they visit your page, take a quick look and realize it was not what they were looking for, and leave your site to find another which better meets their search query. Any action such as hitting the back button, closing the browser, clicking on an ad on your page, clicking on an external link, or typing a new URL into the browser would result in a “bounce.”
While many people are currently using a program such as Google Analytics to determine their bounce rate, you can easily figure it out on your own by dividing the number of visitors who left your site after viewing one page by the total number of visits. In other words, if you received 7000 total visits for the month of May, yet 3400 of those left after looking at only one page, then your bounce rate would be 0.48 or 48%. The lower the bounce rate the better, of course, and if you want an exact bounce rate a good web analytics program can automatically tract these numbers for you.
Taking Your Bounce Rate Seriously
Most research agrees that when users arrive on a webpage they decide whether or not they will stay in less than 3 seconds, usually not even scrolling down the page. If they note excessive or intrusive advertising they are gone in an instant. Users will almost immediately assess whether the header and graphics appear professional then will skim the page title and introductory text in order to determine if there is anything of value or just what they can get from the site right this minute. This means that your goal for your website must be to both satisfy and impress your user within mere seconds of their arrival, ensuring your content which resides above the fold is clear, well-presented and compelling. Get to the point of your content right away, show the purpose of your site, and prove that you know your topic. In short, your website’s bounce rate measures the overall quality of the site from your visitor’s point of view.
Reducing Your Bounce Rate
- Design is important because should your visitors find anything other than what they expect to find—or a presentation that is truly awful—they will be gone in a flash. Clean, uncluttered and professional designs are always preferable to flashy sites full of bells and whistles, yet potentially confusing to visitors.
- As always, content is crucial. If your content is not highly focused and relevant to what your users are looking for, then they won’t care why, they will just leave. Focused content means you concentrate on one specific subject at a time, and that it is immediately obvious what that subject is. Great content will naturally lower your bounce rate, so make it a priority. Update your content often, remembering that lots of posts that essentially say nothing are not better than fewer posts that offer interesting, compelling content.
- Take the navigation portion of your site extremely seriously—if your user is unable to immediately determine how to easily navigate your site, they will be off to find a site which does offer simple navigation. Navigation must be simple and must be accessible from every page on your website. The landing page is equally important—it must never be poorly written, unappealing or hard to read.
- In general avoid intrusive ads and pop-ups or anything that sings and dances, distracting your visitor from the content they came for. Discreet ads on side-bars or headers which don’t move or shout at the visitor are acceptable, but all in all, users hate ads. Make sure your pages load quickly—today’s web surfers are an impatient, tremendously busy group.
- Finally, no matter how compelling your headlines are, remember that your content must match the headline and must deliver on any promise made. In other words, if your headline promises to guide the user through the DUI process then the article talks only about how great the DUI attorney is, your visitor will be disappointed, will bounce—and will not return. If you make promises in your headlines, make sure you keep them.
Overall, a high bounce rate tells Google and other search engines that your visitors simply are not finding what they need on your site. Since the goal of search engines is to deliver relevant content to users, you may be penalized for a high bounce rate. In general, anything below 50% is considered an acceptable bounce rate, while numbers higher than that should be immediately addressed.
