Improving Your Bounce Rate – How Low Can You Go?

Bounce rate. It sounds kind of fun, right? Like a moonbounce or something.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In marketing, the word ‘bounce’ is used more in the style of the early 2000’s: “Yo, dude. Let’s bounce.”

So the higher your bounce rate, the more people who are bouncing away from your website.

Not good. So let us go into a bit more detail about this bounce rate and what it’s deal is.

Bounce Rate, What Are You?

It’s the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only going to one page. This one page can be the homepage or any other page on your site. The main point is that your visitors don’t feel the need to browse or check out the rest of your website, which isn’t a good thing.

Those cool “year 2000” guys walked into a party, didn’t really want to look around, and said, “Let’s bounce.”

Exceptions

Sometimes it may not matter if your bounce rate is high. There are three reasons this could be the case.

1. You have a one-page website, so anyone who leaves you website is counted as a bounce.


2. A particular page is so helpful that a visitor sees it and now knows all they need to know.


3. There’s a CTA on the page that doesn’t need visitors to navigate to another page, like a form or a phone number to call. In this case, they convert on the one page they view.

What Counts as a Bounce

If a visitor does any of these things, they bounced:

• Clicked on a link to another site


• Typed in a new URL


• Clicked the back button


• Closed the window


• Their session timed out (their window sat idle for too long)

The Equation

I’m not sure how I always get stuck with this math stuff, but luckily for me (and you!), the bounce rate equation is super simple!

Bounce rate = total visitors viewing one page only/total entries to that page

FYI, Google Analytics can do the math for you, as well as keep track of it for different pages of your website.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate

So with a high bounce rate, you know that people aren’t sticking around on your website, but you don’t know why . Here are some things you can try:

Add Internal Links

Within your own content, you can add links to other pages of your website. There’s a good chance that several pages of your site relate to each other. But readers won’t visit them if they don’t know about them.

‘Learn More’ Pages

Instead of simple product pages, go a step further by creating pages that go into more detail about products or services. How-to and customer review pages can keep visitors on your site longer as they dive deeper into your products.

Sidebar Links

It’s possible that a visitor ended up on a product page of your site, but knows nothing about your company. Showcase ‘About Me’ or ‘Founder’s Story’ pages to encourage visitors to find out more about your company.

Improve Content

With Google Analytics, you can see which pages have high and low bounce rates. Look at the pages with low bounce rates and try to identify what makes people click around. Then see how you can use those tactics on pages with higher bounce rates. Use what’s already working for you to your advantage!

If your bounce rates are high across the board, you may want to think about reformatting your site. You may need to rewrite or reorganize content to engage your visitors better.

Keep Visitors With You

The important thing is to hook your visitors and keep them wanting more. Encourage browsing with awesome content, readily available info, and ‘About Me’ pages.

Catch those “year 2000” dudes before they say, “Let’s bounce.”

Improving Your Bounce Rate – How Low Can You Go?