What is Bounce Rate and How to Improve It?

They Came, They Saw, They Left

A high bounce rate percentage is usually an indication that the people visiting your website:

1. Did not find what they were looking for or…

2. Didn’t like what they saw. In any case they left as soon as they arrived.

An Important Metric – What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a measurement, generally expressed as a percentage that lets you know the number of visits to your website, where the visitor landed on your website and left after only viewing a single page.

What’s a Good Bounce Rate?

I think it depends. Some in the industry suggest that a bounce rate between 25-35% is ideal. Another way of saying it is this: No more than 2-3 people bouncing off of your site for every 10 that visit. I suppose that makes sense, but in reality, I think it will depend on the type of website you have and web page that someone lands on.

Not all High Bounce Rates are Bad

Some pages will inherently have high bounce rates. Pages such as…

• Contact and sign up pages
• Pages that contain lots of external links
• Pages with videos from sites such as YouTube will generally have high bounce rates.

A high bounce rate on these pages does not always indicate a problem. What you will need to determine is, whether or not these types of pages are converting for you.

How Do I Decrease Bounce Rate?

Here are some things that you can do to lower your website’s bounce rate:

• Install Analytics Software on your website, such as Google Analytics. You should be measuring your traffic, how are you going to know if the site is achieving the desired purposes. There’s no way to know what to fix if you don’t know what’s broken. Having good metrics will let you know what works on your website and what doesn’t.
• Eliminate any Technical Issues associated with your website such as page load speed, directory structure and navigation. Make sure that your site’s layout is user friendly, text, colors, etc. Also, make sure that you are not weighing down pages with heavy graphics or too many images on a single page.
• If You Have a WordPress Site. Make sure that you do not have a plugin that is causing the problem.  I once had a WordPress plugin installed on my site that was causing the pages to load slowly or hang. The bounce rate for the site was 100% during those days, until I fixed the problem.
• Check Browser and Device Compatibility. Another important thing is to make sure that your site can be viewed using multiple browsers such as Internet Explorer vs Firefox and multiple devices like, PC’s, Tablets and Cell/mobile phones.
• Write Good Content. Blog posts that are well written, especially those that either answer a visitor’s questions or solves their problems generally do well.
• Target Good Traffic – Make sure that you are targeting the right kind of visitors. Ensure that the keyword phrases you are optimizing your site for, match your content.
• Choose Keywords that Match Your Content. Research how to apply basic SEO on your website. SEO is short for search engine optimization.
• Recommend other Articles or Content on Your Site. One of the things I like to do is suggest articles that the visitor might also like reading or find helpful, after a post..

You Might Also Like

Here is a great article written by the Simple SEO Group that provides case studies on “How Web Design Affects Bounce Rate“.

You might also want to check out another article written by Neil Patel titled “How to decrease Your Bounce Rate“.

Here’s great article about metrics and analytics that will help you better understand what you should be measuring. It’s titled: “Google Analytics: Basic Overview“