I have a passionate interest in what’s happening on my site. I’m especially concerned about a high bounce rate. But first, an explanation.
Bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” Or put another way it’s “the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”“. In a YouTube video Google’s Avinash Kaushik claims that bounce rate is the “sexiest metric ever”. It’s “brilliantly dumb” he says before going on to state that it’s a visitor’s way of saying “I came, I puked, I left”.
A visit of less than 5 seconds is usually considered “instant”. Unless you own a a single page site or all of the actions you want a person to make are on a single page a high bounce rate is aways a bad thing. Why?
Well, if you’re selling advertising or affiliate products a high bounce rate means you’re ads are achieving fewer impressions, less click-throughs and lower revenue. If you’re selling real estate it means your visitor has either called your mobile or left the site after just a single page view. Trust me, you want it to be the former.
In my case I want people to do a couple of things. In the fist instance I want them to subsribe to my e-newsletter and second I want them to send me an inquiry about my consulting or speaking services. Both of these actions involve at least two page views. The first is when the person fills in an online form, the second when a confirmation page displays. So even if my page worked exactly as I wanted it to every single time I still don’t want bounces.
My blog isn’t the only blog with a high bounce rate. Social media expert Chris Brogan also laments a high bounce rate. In fact high bounce rates are common on blogs. Why? Often visitors read only the latest post. They don’t stay to click through to other pages. Of course that’s not the fault of the visitor but it does give the blog owner – myself and Chris Brogan to a name two – some work to do.
According to Maki, of Dosh Dosh, “bounce rates will vary depending on the source“. Someone arriving from a Google search may be more inclined to click around to find what they’re looking for than someone who arrives via Twitter and who’s just interested in reading a single page or post.
For example, over the past month my most visited page is Ten Tips for Creating a Great Facebook Business Page. It ranks well on Google for the search terms “Facebook business tips” and “Facebook business page tips” and produces a big percentage of the total page views on my site. Nearly 80% of the visits to this page come from Google. But it also has a high bounce rate. On some days it has a bounce rate of 100%. What this means is that people are either finding all the answers in that one post – doubtful – or they’re leaving to continue their search elsewhere. I’ll probably never get them back.
The performance of this one page is hurting me financially. Visitors are leaving without subscribing to an e-newsletter or interacting with the other content on the site. It’s great that it’s attracting visitors but it’s not helping achieve any of my marketing objectives.
So what am I doing about the problem? Here’s my to-do list. These tips are are probably relevant to a lot of sites, especially blogs.
- Add a related posts plugin. This will add links to other posts that are related in some way to the page being viewed. Real estate agents should consider doing this with similar properties.
- Create more internal links. I’ve done that in this post. Internal links help my posts rank better in search and give my visitors another way to access related content.
- Improve the performance of my top content posts by creating a new post updating the information in the original post. Link to the new post from the original post.
- Improve the call to action on my subscribe to email box.
- Improve the call to action on the Facebook Pages e-book badge.
Finally, while bounce rate is an important metric, it’s not the only one. Without high-volume, high-quality traffic a website will never deliver sales results. Equally you can have lots of traffic but with a high bounce rate the site still won’t work. But lowering my site’s bounce rate will at least be a step in the right direction.
So how’s the bounce rate on your site? Is it high or low? What have you done to reduce it?
Photo credit: Kortoni on Flickr / CC BY 2.0
