Bounce Rate Basics

If you have a website you should be taking an interest in the amount and quality of traffic that is hitting your site. You spend energy, time, marketing efforts and money for this valuable traffic. Do you know what your bounce rate is?

Bounce rate is referred to when a visitor comes to your site and then leaves before visiting any other pages within the site or doesn't stay for very long.

 This means they either did not find something interesting to keep them there, or they did not find a reason to click on any other page or article within your site. This means you spent the money getting
someone to your site and they left with only a slight impression of your brand. It is one of the important factors used to analyze your website traffic, visit quality, goals and conversion rate. It is just the percentage of the single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. If this rate is too high then it indicates that the entrance pages for visitors are not relevant to visitors. One way that can reduce your bounce rate; you can provide your audience high quality content which should relevant with your landing pages.

Here are some ways that can improve your bounce rate;

Your website should load faster; it will definitely attract your audience. Do not use heavy website designs that reduce your website efficiency. You should maintain a good balance between load time and web page design. Load time of a web page definitely attracts more user attention as compared to heavy pages which take longer time to load. You can increase your website speed by using following techniques.

Page Speed is an open source add-on. It enables web developers to compression images, find ideas about improving page speed by compressing CSS and JavaScript code.

Webmaster Tools gives you with a website performance graph under Dashboard- Labs - Site Performance. It is used to analyze your website load time speed over the past few months.

Ensure your website is optimized for related search queries. Google Webmaster Tools provides you with the list of queries people are using worldwide to reach your website. The list of search queries would be increasing over time based on your site authority and search terms people type-in to reach your site.

A heat map is a visual chart used to analyze where most people look when they open your web site. By having a heat map, you can re-organize your existing websites to meet the information needs of your target audience. Heat maps also used to analyze high performance vs. poor performance areas on a landing page.

Google Analytic offer incredible statistics about your website traffic. This tool also enables you to analyze entry, exit pages, unique page views and various other useful metrics.

I often see many people confuse between bounce rate and Exit Ratio. However, the exit ratio is the percentage of exits from a page to the total number of visits to that page. One more ratio is confused with bounce rate; single page visit ratio is a percentage of single page visits over total visits to a page.
Single Page Visit Ratio;Single Page Visits to the page/ Total Visits to the page

Exit Ratio: Total Exists from the page/Total Visits on the page or Total Exits from the page/Total Page Views of the page

Bounce Rate: Single Page Visits to the page/Total Entries to the site through that page.
The average bounce rate falls between 18 – 30%. Any web page with a bounce rate higher than 30% should be looked at closely.

Following are some of the numbers that were listed by Steve Jackson based on his experience with various sites.
Website Bounce Rate
Retail sites driving 20-40%
Simple landing pages 70-90%
Content websites 40-60%
Portals like MSN, Yahoo groups etc. 10-30%
Service sites 10-30%
Lead generation 30-50%

You should find out what your bounce rate is. Use Google Analytics to get this information right away. The second step is to create something on your site that will motivate the viewer to stay, shop, or better yet give you their contact information.

A common method is to offer something of value to the viewer for free if they will tell you a little bit about themselves. Normally this is a down-loadable document of some kind in exchange for their name and email. My recommendation is to make sure this free information is VERY valuable. Yes. Give some of your most valuable information for FREE. If I am interested in your product or service and you offer me very valuable information at no cost I am much more likely to engage with you further and pay you for something else that you are offering.

Another helpful method is the utilization of a video with a very interesting title and content. Entice me to click on the play button and hear what you have to say. This video needs to be very valuable, informative and engaging. After the viewer has seen your video they need to know more about you and what you can do for them. They should trust you more after they view the video.

Test, test, test: Try different free products, different videos and so on. You will find that different strategies work better on specific markets or lead sources. Once you have discovered which strategy works best for each of your lead sources, accommodate those leads by presenting them with the form of media and type of information that seems to best suit them.

Bounce rate is very important in determining the future of your marketing and web development strategies. Continually monitoring this very important metric can save very valuable resources by helping you to detect early success or failure of particular marketing strategies related to each lead source.