A bounce rate is the number of visitors that arrive on your site, and only view the one page that they land on. First, the user is referred to a site by either typing in the domain name, or clicking through from a linking site, or finding a site via search engines, etc, then, never going past the page that they landed on. Essentially they’ve landed and “bounced” off.
A bounce rate is one of the most important stats in web analytics. It can act as an immediate red flag to let you know if your landing page is effective or not. If you have a high bounce rate (50%+), chances are your landing page isn’t as effective as it could be. A lot of times, webmasters have spent so much time optimizing their websites for search engines, that they’ve lost focus on what’s happening when people arrive at their site. Sure they’re driving more traffic to their site, but without knowing what percentage of people are visiting more than one page, it’s hard to determine if you’re driving quality traffic.
Bounce rate can be measured by just about every analytics platform available. Our preference is Google Analytics (free). After logging in to Google Analytics, one of the first things you’ll see on the dashboard is your bounce rate. The reason that Google has positioned it so front and center is because they recognize its importance. They want to help webmasters build content that allows people to find exactly what they’re looking for. When someone lands on a page and leaves right away, that usually means that the content on the site is not what they’re looking for, or it isn’t laid out in a way that shows them that this is indeed what they are looking for.
So, how can you fix a high bounce rate? I recommend identifying the pages on your site that have a high bounce rate (start with 75%+), and determine how these people are getting to your site. Once you’ve found all the sources of traffic to that page, see if there are common themes in the information they’re looking for. Once you know what these users are looking for, you can begin tweaking the content/layout on your page to be more in line with what they’re looking for. Don’t stop tweaking until you’ve seen your bounce rate decrease to an acceptable level. Acceptable levels for bounce rates are below 50%, if you have a bounce rate below 30%, you’re doing exceptionally well.
Thanks,
Joseph McConellogue
Sweet, good to know.