Bounce Rate

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for analysing your site visitors and its performance. Obviously good indicators of success are the number of unique visitors and the number of pages per visit. Another metric which is less clear is the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit a page and then leave your website after only looking at a single page.  Your bounce rate will depend on the sources of traffic. You can consider four main categories of traffic:

• search engines – this is an important category and you would like to make the bounce rate for this as low as possible. These visitors reach your site by directly querying the search engine. If you have a high bounce rate for these visitors it could indicate that your site is ranking for keywords that it does not have the content to support in which case you should try and add content for this new flow of traffic or target your key phrases to something more targeted to users expectations.
• direct traffic from websites linked to your site. These visitors have an interest in the content of your site but it is not usually as strong as from a direct search query. If you bounce rate is high for such visitors then you may have a problem with the usability of your pages.
• social media - the bounce rate from visitors who get to your site from sites such as Stumble Upon and Digg have a high bounce rate, they are often aimless surfers who are not looking for anything further than seeing one page. It quite usual to have a high bounce rate from these casual visitors.
• regularly returning visitors – you would expect the bounce rate to be lower than for visitors that came to the site by search. However, these visitors may have already read your most up-to-date posts and there is nothing for them to read at the moment.

The bounce rate shown in Analytics will be a mixture of these elements but you can see where traffic comes from by looking at the traffic sources. If you have a high bounce rate it means that your doing something wrong. If your bounce rate is more than 50% and you get good targeted it is okay but you should be trying to do the most to get the extra clicks.

Common Reasons for a High Bounce Rate

If you have a high bounce rate what can you do about it? The first thing to do is to find out why the bounce rate is so high.

Usability

• It could be that the page content is not compelling enough improve the layout with images.
• Maybe visitors do not easily understand what the page content is about.
• Are the content pages linked together when related topics occur in the content? Adding links within the paragraphs of text to point to useful information, especially when those links are to other pages in your site.
• Pages take too long to load, visitors get feed up and go somewhere else. Find a more reliable host or remove anything which is slowing the site down such as unnecessary JavaScript or Flash.
• Can your visitors scan the content easily?
• Are the navigation menus and search facility intuitive enough to find content easily. Look at the post on usability.

Wrong Keywords

If people are visiting your site and then going somewhere else it maybe indicative that you are being found for searches that don’t relate with your visitors expectations. It is no good to just get traffic. Un-targeted traffic is using your resources and may cost you money. Look at your keyword research and ask whether the terms you are chasing relate to the pages. Can you add more content to target the keywords you are being found for? Maybe you should be targeting different keywords which maybe lower in search volume but provide more targeted visitors.