Bounce Rate and how to improve it
The Bounce Rate has always concerned webmasters but what exactly is the Bounce Rate? According to Google the Bounce Rate is:
The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate can be seen as the measurement of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that the visitor finds your landing page irrelevant to them.
What constitutes a bounce?
A visitor can ‘bounce’ from your site by:
- Clicking on a link to a page in a different website.
- Clicking the ‘back’ button and leaving your site.
- Closing the browser window or the current tab.
- Typing in a new URL (or web address) thus leaving your site.
- Session Timeout – The user could walk away from the computer leaving the browser open. After a certain amount of time Google Analytics will ‘timeout’ the session and a bounce will be recorded.
Improving your Bounce Rate
| Factors that effect Bounce Rate | Ways to improve Bounce Rate |
| Search engine ranking of page (pages that rank higher on irrelevant keywords) have higher bounce rates | Provide relevant content |
| Type of audience | Build clear navigation and menus. (don’t make the user think!) |
| Landing page design | Link to a glossary page that explains industry terms – eg. SEO – What does SEO mean? |
| A consistent message on your advert and landing page | Place a search function within your landing page to encourage people to search for something they may well be looking for |
| E-Mails and newsletters may increase your bounce rate | Remove all pop up ads on your landing page |
| A slow page load – to slow and potential customers will be clicking that back button | Speed up your page load! Use tools such as the Google Page Speed plugin |
| Links to external sites | Reduce links to external sites or if you do need the make sure they open in an external window (target=_BLANK”) |
| Make sure the page has a purpose and has a prominent call to action |
Also check out our blog post on the perfect landing page to help improve your bounce rate.
22nd September 2011
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To add to the Bounce Rate issue, there are a lot of factors to be considered.
The Bounce rate which we see in the Google Analytics is not something the search engines consider for quality purposes. Search engine consider the “Dwell Time” which is nothing but the time spent on a page by the visitor before leaving back to the search results page or closing the page (without going to any other page on the site).
Also, there are two types of bounce rates: Actual Bounce Rate and Standard Bounce Rate
Actual bounce rate: user visiting your page from search results page and leaving within a few seconds without navigating to any other page on the site. The bounce rate what you see in the Google Analytics program is nothing but the Actual Bounce Rate. This is a negative sign as the Dwell Time is just a few seconds.
Standard bounce rate: A person visits a page with high quality content, reads the full content and then leave (spends more than 10 mins). Also, he doesn’t visit any other page on the site. This is still a bounce, but “Standard Bounce Rate”. Here this is not considered as a negative sign by the search engines as the Dwell Time is more than 10 mins!