Bounce Rate and How To Reduce It For Your Website

Getting To The Restaurant And Deciding To Eat Elsewhere

The best description I have ever heard to describe bounce rate is that its like doing all the hard work to attract someone to a restaurant and once they arrive and see the place they walk straight out and decide to eat elsewhere.  Harsh but true and by implication all the effort, resources, time and money to achieve this visitor is wasted.  So put simply the bounce rate is the rate of website visitors that after arriving at the home page of your website regardless of how long they stay,  exit without any other interaction with any other page on the site. So for example with one thousand website visitors land on your website and seven hundred leave without going any deeper into the site you will have a bounce rate of seventy (70) percent.

What Constitutes An Acceptable Bounce Rate

Now although I have heard many arguments over the years about what constitutes a good or a bad bounce rate, I think I can safely say that anything over thirty (30) percent as demonstrated by a typical Google Analytics metrics report, is genuinely unacceptable based on everything we know about what causes it and by definition, what remedies will improve it.

Sadly some of the websites I have seen and worked on through 2014-15 with the Digital Enterprise Program have shown me sites that have had bounce rates of up to a staggering ninety percent.

So what can we do ten to minimise this website business killer?


Proven remedies for High Bounce Rates

1. Fast loading home (or otherwise designated landing) pages. Typically most website visitors will only wait a few seconds for a page to fully load and if it doesnt in say three to four seconds, they will be gone. Therefor it is vital that you ensure that your landing page is quick to load on an browser and with any type of device.  To test your website's loading speed you can test it using:http://www.webpagetest.org



2. The page is attractive, functional and intuitive to navigate. Assume from the start that your visitor isn't an IT luminary with a multimedia degree and requires an intuitive interface to stay.


3. Your webpage is responsive and thanks to the wonders of CSS formats perfectly to any device. This has always been a nice thing to have but since April 21,  2015 is now a Google imposed imperative. Enough said.


4. Your content is clear, concise, relevant and well written in a way that will resonate with your target market. If you feel it doesn't, rewrite it now.


5. The content provides true value in that it meets the needs of the visitors and in the process is timely, educational, humorous and written to solve problems.


6. The images on the page are  relevant to the topic and do not distract from the content on the page.


7. Appropriate calls to action are clearly visible and provide a clear cut action step to drive behaviour beyond this first landing page.


8. The headings on the landing page are aligned with the call to action or advertisement title, so that the website visitor is  comfortable with where they have landed.


9.  In trying to develop prospect and customer information such as email lists, you do not over reach by asking  for excessive information too early.


10. The key functionality of the page is above the fold and therefore does not require the visitor to scroll excessively below the natural fold of the page.


By ensuring that your website or blog landing page adheres to these key landing page principles you will be able to maximise the attractiveness of your landing page and minimise the dreaded bounce rate.


If you'd like more information on website design or any other aspect of digital strategy, join us at any of the seven digital enterprise workshops as outlined on:

http://www.vecci.org.au/business-solutions/digital-enterprise-program/workshops



And so until next time, good luck and good marketing.


Regards,

Daniele.