What Is Bounce Rate And How To Reduce It?

Richie Contartesi

What Is Bounce Rate? Why Do People Leave Your Site?

You figure you’ve got a great Website or landing page, but you aren’t generating the leads, sales, or opt-ins you expected. What gives? Well, let’s first take a look and see how long people are staying on your page. This is called your bounce rate. What is bounce rate in short? This is how frequently new users leave your site without scrolling or clicking. You can do this by logging into your google analytics account. Your google analytics bounce rate will be on the main page. If you have another analytics platform, it should be one of the first things you see:

Bounce Rate Google Analytics

Your now are probably asking what is good bounce rate?!? What I have found after doing an analysis for the past year on over 100 websites that I manage and some that I do not is 25 to 45 percent is excellent. Forty-six to 65 percent is roughly an average bounce rate and 65 to 75 percent is higher than average. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything except blogs, news, events, and other sites of this type. So, how do you prevent people from leaving your page? Let’s take a look a deeper look at what is some major causes for people to leave a web page, and how to reduce bounce rate:

1. Does Your Website Have Too Many Ads:

If you’ve got tons of ads jumping out at your visitor, they might be overloaded. Try to make sure the ads aren’t the first thing your visitor sees, and avoid obtrusive pop-up ads that cover up the good content. Running ads can be perfectly fine, but you need to be tasteful and discreet in how you do it.

2. Does Your Website Have Poor Usability?

Web page visitors don’t want to have to think about how to get around your site, so make sure your navigation is consistent, logical, and easy to understand. You should try grouping all of your navigation elements in one centralized location. If you have a large site, consider adding a sitemap to help your visitors out. Whatever you do, don’t:

• Bury your navigation links in the body text.
  
• Make your link text hard to understand.
  
• Scatter your navigation links around the site.

3. Bad Content Structure:

If your important content, like your contact information, is hard to find, you could lose as many as 50 percent of your potential sales. Make sure you remember introductory content, and keep content together when it goes together. Don’t complicate your site by having similar content scattered across different pages. Follow these tips:

• Group similar content in a clear, concise way. **Provide Value**
  
• Use bold headings in addition to highlighting important keywords that visitors might be searching for.
  
• Don’t make your visitors fish around for the information/content they are looking for.

4. Don’t Force Your Audio And Video On Your Visitors:

Most people would rather pick and choose which content they’re going to absorb. By making video or audio load automatically when the page is loaded, you could be driving visitors away.

5. Making EVERY Visitor Register:

Sure, you want to get those leads, but think about this: a forced registration will often drive the visitor away completely, rather than encouraging them to sign up on your site. If you really want to require registration for your blog or an offer, be sure to provide enough free content that its worth it.

6. Boring Design & Content: How Much Does Custom WordPress Design Cost?

If your landing page is dull, it won’t create memories for your visitor. This means losing that visitor, because they’ll move on to a site that is more exciting or has more interactivity.

7. Is Your Website Content Old And Outdated?

Even if everything else is great about your site, if you haven’t updated it in a while, you WILL be driving people away.

• Keep your content fresh. Not only will this make your site more interesting, it’ll boost your rankings on the search engines, too (make sure to constantly do keyword research).
  
• Try adding a blog! Blogging is an easy way to keep fresh content rolling off the presses of your site, attract and convert new users, position yourself as an expert, and SEO!

By keeping these seven biggest issues with your bounce rate in mind, you should find your retention rate climb, and along with it your sales. You just have to give your visitors a reason to stick around, and avoid giving them reasons to leave!

So what is bounce rate? Do you understand the concept and how to reduce it? Let us know in the comments below if this has helped you or if you have any additional ideas or question.

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