Understanding Bounce Rate and Why it is So Important
Many companies as well as individuals who have online businesses don’t really understand bounce rate.
In a nutshell, a bounce occurs when someone visits your website, views a single page and then leaves. The implications for online businesses is that high bounce rates are bad. When high bounce rates occur usually the content on your website doesn’t match what the visitor was looking for so they click off and look for something else.
A high bounce rate is a tell-tale sign that your content is not targeted to the browser’s wants and needs. If you look into your Google Analytics you’ll see a percentage. If your average bounce rate for instance is 75%, then 75% of the people who come to your website leave after only viewing the page they entered on. This could be your home page or an internal page. The key to success is to make sure that once visitors land on a page, they are drawn to looking at more pages throughout your website. In other words, it’s essential to have a low bounce rate.
Techniques on how to track your bounce rate
Your first stop in trying to track your bounce rate can be found in Google analytics. When you sign into your Google analytics profile for your website you are greeted with an average bounce rate. Here are some factors you can learn from your website bounce rate through analytics:
- Best “sticky” content – first you will want to drill down your content. Through Google Analytics, you will be able to analyse your blogs, home page bounce rate, popular posts and their relevant bounce rates.
- Best traffic sources – next check out best traffic sources which have brought the most visitors to your website including their respective bounce rates. From this information, you will be able to see your top referrers, strongest social referrers and what the highest bounce rate is at traffic source.
- Best keywords – diving deeper into your traffic sources will enable you to discover which keywords have brought the most visitors to your website and their respective bounce rates. You can even see which landing page keywords led visitors to your website by clicking on the landing page link above the data.
How to lower your bounce rate
Now that you’ve learnt a little more about bounce rate and why it is so important for your website’s success, the next step is to find out how to lower your bounce rate. Here are some helpful ideas:-
- Add links to the pages on your website within your content
- Add links to content everyone will love to your sidebar
- Go beyond just product pages
- Improve your content
Always keep visitors interested so they will return to your website again and again. This can be achieved by giving them links that are accessible throughout your website to social media profiles, newsletters or other online properties.