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Are you finding it difficult to increase your site’s visibility on search engines, get more leads, or convert more clients? Your bounce rate might be the culprit.
When visitors and customers who come to your site leave without checking other pages, you have a high bounce rate. Is a higher bounce rate important? How do you make your website stick for increased engagement, conversion and revenue? Find out in this article.
What Is Bounce Rate?
According to Google Analytics, bounce rate is “The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”
If you are struggling to increase your site’s search performance, a high bounce rate is one of the most important analytic metrics you need to watch. A high bounce rate shows your strategy is not working. It may be because your content is poor, navigation is abysmal or you are attracting the wrong traffic to your website, leading to poor user experience.
For clarification, the landing page is the page through which a user visits your website. If the visitor leaves your site without clicking other pages, you have a bounce.
How to Calculate Bounce Rate
To calculate bounce rate, find the number of single page visits and divide your answer by the number of total visits. The value you get represented as a percentage of the total visits is your website bounce rate. For example, if your website receives 2000 visitors in a month and 500 of those visitors don’t view another page on the website before leaving, the bounce rate of the website is 25%. A high bounce rate shows your website’s overall engagement is poor.
What Is A Good Bounce Rate?
It is difficult to determine an ideal bounce rate as the value depends on factors such as the content, website, industry, and audience. Websites that provide general information articles whose main traffic source is organic search may have atrociously high bounce rates. This is because visitors usually find the specific information they want on one page, so they need not visit other pages on the site. A low bounce rate may look good in theory, but it may be a sign of low overall engagement.
When Is A Higher Bounce Rate OK?
Not all high bounce rates mean you have a shitty website. In the cases below, a higher bounce rate is not a problem.
- Informational pages with no call to action
- Product pages that redirect to a third-party site like Amazon
- Pages that include contact details
- Ads that lead to third-party sites
- When users land on a product page to make a purchase
- Completing a form that does not redirect to another page
How to Improve Bounce Rate
Regardless of the industry or type of content on your webpages, a lower bounce rate works to your advantage as it increases your site’s engagement performance. If you want to improve user experience, lower bounce rates and increase conversions, the following tips will help.
Recalibrate Analytics
Your site’s high bounce rates may be caused by the metrics used to measure it. Google Analytics considers a visit as a “bounce” if the user didn’t click to other pages on the site, regardless of whether the visitor interacts and spends time on that page. This means that the software counts active and nonnative viewers as bounces despite one group engaging more with the site.
One solution to this problem is to generate virtual page views in Google Analytics for relevant actions. With virtual page views, you can track the level of engagement and the number of people who interact with your page, helping you avoid counting active viewers as bounces.
Improve Readability
A larger percentage of people now browse through mobile. If your website’s legibility is poor, most won’t stay for long. Regardless of the quality of your content, you will have a higher bounce rate if users struggle to make sense of your posts. Use subheadings, bullet points, bold text and italics to improve readability.
Improve Website Design And Usability
Website layout plays an important role in user experience. By improving upon the design and usability of your website interface, you can increase engagement, deepen user experience and increase conversion. You may have to update the graphics to more visually appealing types, improve the color contrast, tweak font size and enhance calls to action on landing pages.
Usability involves making it easy for users to find information on your website. A large search bar, a clear and clutter-free navigational layout, navigation menus and distinctly grouped categories of products and services can increase user experience.
Responsive Web Design
Is your website mobile responsive? As more people use the internet through mobile devices, you must optimize your website for enhanced responsiveness across platforms, screen size and devices. Not only should your pages be responsive, but they also need to be adaptive and robust enough to deliver a quality experience for users regardless of device. Visitors should never have to bend or zoom out their screen before they can read the content on your site.
Increase Page Load Time
How long does your site take to load? Internet users have a short span of attention when searching for the right information. If your pages take more than a few seconds to load, people will probably bounce off your site. A lot of factors affect your website load speed but one of the most important is the quality of hosting. So, you need to invest in a quality hosting service to enjoy faster loading speed for an improved user experience.
Eliminate Pop-up Ads
Pop-up ads annoy users and increase bounce rates. Not only do pop-ups dilute the user experience, but some of these ads contain poor messaging that irritate visitors and hasten their departure from the site. If you are using pop-ups to build an email list, consider stopping their use. However, you can use them in a way that does not interfere with the site’s overall user experience.
Craft A Powerful Call-To-Action
Do you have a call-to-action on your website? If you do, is it compelling enough to make visitors take action or think about buying? If your CTA is weak, all the effort and resources channeled into creating excellent content and a beautiful interface may not yield any dividend.
A powerful CTA will compel users to act and do your bidding. Not only the wording of your call to action matters, the positioning, text, and size can improve results. Great CTAs improve user experience, reducing your bounce rate. When users spend more time on your site, the chances of conversion increases and so does your revenue.
Target The Right Audience
If you are attracting the right market, your bounce rate will go down naturally. You need to understand your audience, their pain points, desires, and tailor your content and customer acquisition strategy to solve their problems. Also, your messaging has to be consistent with the expectations of your target market if you want to increase your website’s stickiness.
Some industries require long form articles of over 1500 words while others do well with shorter and more precise posts. Know what interests your audience and give it to them consistently for an improved engagement and lower bounce rates.
Is your bounce rate higher than you would like it to be? What are you doing to achieve ideal numbers? Let me know in the comment section.
I hope you enjoyed this article if you have any questions or you just want to leave your own personal experience, leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you!
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