If you own a website, it’s recommended to check its performance if you want to improve your online marketing and SEO strategy. Many of the renowned websites that promote high quality content and have tens of thousands of unique visitors every day, focus on the importance of performance metrics in Google Analytics. But how do you react when you access your account and see an increased bounce rate? What action do you take first and how do you create a strategy that can help you decrease your website’s bounce rate?
First things first, you need to inform yourself about what bounce rate is: how is it calculated, how does it affect your website and what exactly makes it increase. This article intends to share with you some fundamental information about bounce rate, so you can have a better view of the bigger picture and learn about the effects of bounce rate on your website’s performance.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is a qualitative metric that measures the percentage of daily single-page visits on your website.
It can be expressed using this formula:
Rb= ( Tv/Te) ≤ Ps, which means:
Rb = Bounce rate
Tv = Total number of visitors viewing one page only
Te = Total entries to page
Ps = page load speed
In other words, bounce rate represents the visitor’s action of leaving a website right after it lands on it due to various reasons:
- they didn’t find the information he was looking for
- they accessed a link withing the page that redirected him to a different website
- they spent more than 30 minutes on that page (no matter if he was active or not)
- their internet connection failed.
Bounce rate can also increase if you didn’t implement the Google Analytics traffic monitoring code properly or if the monitoring system is not active on all your website’s pages, like when visits on a subdomain of your website are counted as external visits, making the bounce rate artificially increase.
Why is bounce rate important?
Bounce rate is a qualitative metric that is very important for your website, because it tells you if the efforts you put in your site’s optimization returned positive results. In order to check relevant details about your bounce rate, you need to log into your Google Analytics account. A safe bounce rate is around 55%. Everything that exceeds this percentage is an alarm for you to review your website’s content and design. A high bounce rate means that your visitors leave your website too soon because they are not satisfied with your content or the information you provide is not relevant for them.
Every SEO specialist will confirm that a catchy heading is not enough if the article itself has a low quality.
A high bounce rate can also be caused by visitors who reach your website through Google search results, but who are looking for a different type of content than yours. In order to correct this issue, you can check Google Search Console to find out what keywords brought visitors to your page and adapt your content in order to bring more relevant visitors to your website.
Another explanation for a high bounce rate is also a website that annoys the visitors with too many pop-up ads. Also, a lack of a solid internal link building can contribute to a high bounce rate. That’s why you need to offer your visitors an easier way to browse your website, with hyperlinks on the most important keywords that they find in your website’s content.
Keep in mind that not all the pages with a high bounce rate are necessarily related to low quality content. There are a lot of situations when people accidentally access a website due to its great popularity, even if its content is not what they are looking for.
Therefore, when you evaluate the bounce rate of a page, you should take into consideration the traffic segments, the browsing behavior, and to make sure the content is suited for your visitor’s needs.
Why are traffic segments important?
At first, you need to determine the most important traffic segments for your business and start the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process for the pages people tend to visit most often.
The easiest way to identify your website’s traffic segments is to use the 80/20 method. In other words, that implies picking 20% of traffic segments that are responsible for 80% of conversions, using criteria such as: browsing behavior, geolocation, search results, the technology used to access your website (desktop or mobile) and, last but not least, the source that provides the traffic.
Once you clarify the traffic segments subject, you need to select the pages that your visitors are more interested in, and improve them by creating more high quality and relevant content.
Bounce rate is not related only to content
There a lot of other factors that can improve or decrease the quality of your website:
- The website’s design
- Call to action
- Mobile-friendly design and layout
- Low website loading time
- Comment sections
- Good SEO optimization on images
- Aggressive pop-up ads
- A/B testing that is not conducted properly
- Low quality landing pages
As far as the website’s design, one of the latest trends is parallax scrolling, which allows you to use your creativity at its maximum potential. Also, parallax scrolling is excellent for products and services, allowing the user to visualize it in depth. Websites that are designed using parallax scrolling can decrease the bounce rate, by preventing the visitors to leave the website immediately. On the other hand, due to the one page website effect, it can have a lower page loading time, possibly leading to a higher bounce rate. It’s recommended to introduce an event at the half of the page, that communicates to your visitors that they should scroll down further for more information.
Calls to action can negatively influence bounce rate, either because you use too many meaningless words, or visitors don’t understand what action they are required to take, which confuses them even more. This issue can be solved with a strong and visible call-to-action that the visitor should click after he reads the content on the landing page.
Pop-ups are not necessarily related to an increased bounce rate if they are used properly and without annoying the visitors. If you own a presentation website for products and services, you can use pop-up ads to maintain your audience, only if you offer the most advantages/promotions for your most important traffic segments. It’s recommended to not have the same pop-up ads on different pages, constraining the visitor to click “exit” every time a visitor accesses a page on your website. This will annoy him and force him to leave your website as fast as he can.
Let’s talk about landing pages and the effects they have on bounce rate. Most of the websites that have landing pages also have problems in correlating them with the website itself. The rate of rejection that you have on your website is related to the percentage of visitors who access your landing page and leave immediately, without reading the content or interacting with your page. Here are some of the most common issues that landing pages contribute to when bounce rate increases.
- The content from the landing page is different than the one from the ad – not all visitors enjoy “surprises”. If the ad’s title is not the same as the landing page’s title, you are at great risk of losing the visitor’s trust and losing the chance to convert him. This translates into an increase of your bounce rate.
- A lot of news websites embrace this trend of “bombing” the visitor with many intrusive ads that basically force you to watch a video for 30 seconds, for example, before even figuring out what is the website about. We can say the same thing about annoying advertising banners that distract the user’s attention and lower the website’s credibility.
- You redirect the wrong audience to the landing page – you sell cat food in your ad, but your landing page is also targeting dog food, parrot food or fish food. Your budget will run dry at the blink of an eye. It’s recommended to redirect only the traffic segment that you are targeting and that is looking to buy the products/services you sell. The ad should only be an intermediary for them in order to reach faster the products they are intending to buy.
- Bad grammar – there are a lot of visitors that correlate bad grammar with a sign of low quality products or services. A content that has a lot of grammar errors, lots of suspicious images and a low quality design will definitely lead to a high bounce rate.
- Unintelligible content that visitors don’t understand – if the content is hard to digest, it will reduce your website’s credibility and will make visitors want to leave your page immediately. The biggest issues here are related to fonts and chromatic.
A mobile-friendly design for your website also positively contributes to your bounce rate. A lot of people these days use their mobile devices to access the internet. That’s why you need a mobile friendly and responsive website that allows your customers to navigate your website easily. These type of websites are unique due to their ability to create strong links between online and offline media, using QR codes. You don’t necessarily need two distinct websites (desktop and mobile), but you need to make sure your desktop version is also properly optimized for mobile devices. The mobile version of a website is flexible, easy to implement and cost-efficient.
If your website has a low page loading speed, make sure this doesn’t affect your bounce rate. If your website doesn’t load fast, people will exit it or will click the “back” button. Internet users want to receive information as fast as possible. Useful tip: keep a clean codding and don’t upload big sized images that have too many MB.
You can also decrease your bounce rate by introducing a comment section. These functions bring a lot of benefits, especially from a SEO point of view: the visitor spends more time on your page reading comments and writing one himself. Besides that, with the new content brought by comments, the website’s pages are also updated. This way, your website will receive more visits from the new content created and from users who want to read the new comments (especially if they registered for them).
A/B testings that don't run properly can also have a negative impact on your website’s performance. Their role is to combine content and creative graphic elements in different ways so you can decide on the best version you want to use for your ad campaigns. Basically, A/B testings share the same concept with marketing testings of different versions of the same product. Their utility is undoubtful because decisions based exclusively on instinct are not always the best. Each consumer thinks and acts differently based on his individual needs and A/B testing helps you identify the customer’s profile more accurately. The results will help you predict the customer’s future browsing behavior, lowering the risk of an increased bounce rate.
With the help of A/B testings, you can:
- compare different versions of pages, ads or apps, using a random sample of users.
- figure out the percentage of users that you want to include in the testing sessions
- pick the objective you want to test
- receive updates via e-mail about the progress of your testings
Another way to reduce the bounce rate is to include videos in your website, due to the fact that people would rather watch a presentation video than reading a very long text, especially if it’s hard to read and to be understood. A video that is properly integrated into your website can be watched with a simple click and also increases the time your visitors spend on your page. Besides reducing your bounce rate, adding videos to your website has the following advantages:
- You address to a larger audience – the main focus here is on the visitors that browse the internet using mobile devices who would rather watch a video than reading a text. If you ever read (or tried to read) a long text on your phone, no matter how interesting it seemed at first, you eventually got lost on the way and quit.
- You distinguish yourself from the competition – a video is ideal if you want to make a presentation of your brand, your products/services or your team, to answer your customers’ questions. What really matters is to leave a good impression to your potential customers and to raise their curiosity.
Bounce rate differs depending on the type of the website
Online shops have an average bounce rate between 20% and 40%. This is something normal due to the fact that these type of websites have a lot of pages for products, filters, prices, promotions, etc. As long as the sales of the website maintain a balanced level, a higher bounce rate is not a major issue.
Presentation websites of different products or services have an average bounce rate between 40-60%, due to different reasons. Using optimized landing pages for conversions increase the bounce rate, but as long as they convert, it’s a not a warning sign.
News websites and blogs have the highest bounce rate – 70%-80%. In this case, 80% of visitors read the information they are interested and then immediately leave your website. If the bounce rate is high, but the users spend considerable time on your website, it’s not a real issue.
Creating events to decrease your bounce rate
For starters, you should know that Google takes into consideration two types of interaction when it comes to bounce rate: page views and events. Google keeps track of the page views every time a visitor accesses it. Therefore, the first action a visitor has to take is to click other pages from your website.
That’s why you need to create events. Events record how a visitor interacts with your page. For example, they record every time a visitor watches a video, subscribes to your newsletter, downloads a file or clicks on a certain section of a page.
In order for these events to be integrated into Analytics, each of them needs to have a code associated with the website, so that Google can be notified each time a visitor interacts with your page.
If you want to insert an event in your page, you need to add the following code: “setTimeout(‘pageTracker._trackEvent(\’NoBounce\’,\’NoBounce\’,\’Over 30 seconds\’)’,30000);” (for the old version of Analytics) sau setTimeout(‘_gaq.push([\’_trackEvent\’, \’NoBounce\’, \’Over 30 seconds\’])’,30000);(for the new one).
And this is how it works: the script will count 30 seconds from the moment the page loads and it sends Google an event notification. Once the event starts, Analytics will not take the visitor into consideration when it calculates the bounce rate.
Now you know what bounce rate is and how it affects your website rank in Google. If you want to find out about the techniques you can use to decrease your bounce rate, read our article about creating events in Google Analytics.
