15 Oct How To Reduce Bounce Rate on Your Website To Improve Conversions

Heads up business owners, if you have a website, do check out your analytics to see how it’s performing. One of the tools we use is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you understand how your website is performing. It gives you data on where visitors are coming from, what their demographics are, and what they’re doing when they get there. You can use the data to optimize your site so it can convert more users into loyal customers.

One of the data points Google Analytics provide is called the Bounce Rate. Understanding bounce rate and how it affects your whole digital marketing strategy is crucial since you want to maximize your website to its full potential.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric used to measure how well a website is performing. It’s calculated when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. More specifically, a website’s bounce rate measures how many visitors leave a page without performing a specific action, such as buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for understanding how well your website is performing. While there are many different ways to use GA to optimize your website, we’ll focus on just one: understanding your bounce rate.

The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting your site’s home page. If you have a low bounce rate, then you’re doing pretty well!

If you have a high bounce rate, then it’s likely that you’re losing out on potential customers because they’re not being directed to the right place or not finding what they came looking for.

How is Bounce Rate Calculated?

To calculate your bounce rate, you need to know how many pages on your site have been visited and what percentage of those visitors left without performing an action.

The bounce rate is calculated as a percentage of all page views divided by total number of page views. If there are 100 page views on your site, and 90% of those are successful, then your bounce rate will be 90%.

What is considered a good bounce rate?

A high bounce rate means that a visitor’s overall session duration is short; they visit a page on your site and leave. A low bounce rate means that visitors are spending time on a page and clicking on available links. – Semrush

Not all bounce rates are bad though, Google explains that context is still important in this case. For example, if you have an ecommerce website, and the home page is the landing page, you will want people to spend time on the product pages rather than the Home Page, so in this case, it’s okay to have a higher bounce rate for the Home Page rather than your internal pages.

According to Semrush, a bounce rate of 56% to 70% is on the high side, although there could be a good reason for this, and 41% to 55% would be considered an average bounce rate. An optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range. Ideally though, the lower the bounce rate, the better, because it means that people are staying on your website and are consuming the content you are providing on that particular page.

You want people to find exactly what they are looking for on your site. So if they are leaving right away, you will need to know WHY.

Common Reasons for High Bounce Rates

Here are some reasons as to why people are leaving your site right away.

1. Speed

Or lack thereof. Your website needs to load within 5 minutes, otherwise people will opt to search for another site that will give them an answer in less the time. Make sure your site is optimized for speed!

2. Bad Link from Another Website

Oftentimes, the people who have landed on your site accidentally got there. Is there a rouge link somewhere that for some reason links backs to your website? Check your backlinks, and referral traffic to see where your audience is coming from.

3. Bad Content

The most common reason for a high bounce rate, is that they simply did not find what they are looking for in your page. This is why copywriting matters. When a person gets to your site, your headline should immediately draw them further into the page and encourage them to read more!

4. Poor Navigation

When people get to your site, they should be able to find the information they need within 3 clicks. Make sure to have a mobile menu that is easily accessible, provide a site map at the footer, and ensure that you have call to actions that will help them determine where to go next, once they land on your page.

5. Misleading Content

Misleading Meta Titles and Descriptions can bring people to the page for all the wrong reasons, which will make them go back to the search results page. Make sure that every page of your site is properly configured meta details so will only attract the RIGHT people to your site.

Bounce rate, when advertising online, is a term that refers to the number of visitors who come to a web page and then immediately leave. It’s often used as an indicator of whether or not a visitor is satisfied with the information or content provided by the website he or she just visited. Ideally, the goal for any website would be for all visitors to remain on that site after visiting without leaving because they found it to be very informative, entertaining, or otherwise valuable.

The longer the audience interacts and consumes your content, the more trust they form with your brand, therefore, increasing your chances of converting them into your customer.

Not sure where to start? Let Online Philippines help maximize your website’s potential with our Digital Markting Consultation. Contact us for a FREE ASSESSMENT.