What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website and do not view another page on the website to all visitors.
Here’s an example: when people visit any page on your website but do not take any further action like clicking on the appointment page, blogs, or services pages, that visitor is considered bounced. The more visitors bounce, the more they are going to increase the bounce rate. A bounce rate of 0% means all visitors to your website have viewed two or more pages on the website. A bounce rate of 100% means that all website visitors have left the website on the same landing page they visited.
According to Google, bounce rate is calculated in the following way:
Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. In other words, it collects all sessions where a visitor only visited one page and divides it by all sessions to get an average.
Is it possible to have a 0% bounce rate?
Generally, a website with 0% bounce rate is very rare to find for several reasons:
- Many people click on the ads and organic listing by mistake and once they realize that they clicked on the wrong link, they leave the website right away.
- If visitors aren’t interested in the content, they will leave the site without looking at any of the other pages.
- Automated Bots (web spiders/web crawlers) visit most website around the world daily and they usually look at one page (mostly homepage) and leave in less than a second.
What does a high bounce rate mean?
If there are no technical issues, a high bounce rate can mean three things:
- Page quality is low and has nothing inviting or engaging enough to grab the attention of your audience.
- Your audience doesn’t match the page’s purpose, which is why they won’t engage.
- Visitors have not found the information that they were searching for.
How to reduce bounce rate?
Make your pages easy to read
It’s easy to forget such a simple aspect of your pages, but readability is important. There are a lot of free tools that allow you to check how readable your content and website are, such as the Yoast plugin for WordPress. You should also be aware of your font size and type, sentence and paragraph length, and how much white space is on the page. You can use subheadings, which will break your content up into chunks. It is also a good idea to consider other elements on your page that could be distracting, whether it is your color choices and where the ads are placed.
Include clear CTAs and consider their placements
A great way to get people to engage and convert is by using persuasive calls to action.
A call-to-action should instruct someone to do something, like sign up for a newsletter, register for an account, or purchase a product. You can improve your call-to-action buttons in many ways, like improving your copy, color choice, button size, placement on the page, and a lot more.
Here is the example of clear call-to-action buttons:
Use videos and images to engage your audience
Humans are naturally visual creatures; we love the imagery and also retain it better. Adding images that can be clicked and taken to sub-pages is a great way to get your audience to not only engage with your content but also visit pages other than the landing page. Images are more inviting to click. People are more like to not just look at your home page and leave. In a study of the effect of the image, we replace some text with images and there was a noticeable decrease in bounce rate, from 60.98% to 34.78%
Conclusion
We recommend that you focus on the average bounce rate for your industry. For instance, for beauty and fitness, an average bounce is around 56.81%. If you own a website in that industry, you should expect your website’s bounce rate to be close to the industry average. If you have a bounce rate of 40%, then you are doing a great job. A bounce rate of 80% means that you should definitely modify the website.
Analyzing and trying to improve your rate can be intimidating. But by improving your bounce rate, it means that your audience will be engaged, and you will have more conversions. If you follow the steps that have been outlined in this post, you should expect your bounce rate to decrease in no time.
First, understand what a “good” bounce rate really is and narrow down your analysis to pinpoint exactly what your bounce rate metrics are telling you. Also, remember that a site-wide bounce rate is simply a vanity metric. It’s too extensive to provide actionable information. You should also focus on the different segment reports and your other analytics tools to dive into the data.
Be sure to check out your top exit pages, page timings, and speed reports to be able to understand what the reason might be for your bounce rates being so high.
To get people to engage with your content, improve your site’s readability, add imagery, optimize your CTAs, and use live chat. You should also:
- Do some A/B testing to see what works best for you and your audience.
- Keep an eye on your reports and take note of each change to see where and how you’re improving
Remember: There is no magic number that you’re trying to hit. Your goal should be to keep improving and offer your customers a better, more engaging experience.
