Are a large percentage of your website visitors bouncing? This is an indication that something is wrong. It could be any number of factors, such as using irrelevant keywords or not providing the correct information.
Read on for tips regarding how to reduce bounce rate through some simple analysis.
Bounce Rate – What Is It?
Simply put, a bounce is a visitor who arrives at one of your web pages and then leaves within seconds, without browsing through the site. They may leave by clicking the back button, typing in a new URL, closing the window, or clicking through an outbound link on the page. There is no industry-wide accepted time limit; this is determined by the timeout period of your website statistics tracking software.
Technically, there is a formula to determine bounce rate; it is Bounce Rate = total number of visits viewing one page / total number of visits. The majority of analytics programs include this statistic in the tracking reports.
Take a good look at your website statistics. Some of the things you want to pay attention to are the keywords the bounced visitor used to find your site, the page they landed on, and referring sites. This will give you an insight as to the how and why a visitor got to your page as well as an indication of what they were expecting to find there.
How To Reduce Bounce Rate
Now let’s consider how to reduce bounce rate for your site and why this is important…
Arguably the number one reason for a high rate of bounces is due to a lack of clarity on the part of the website owner. This could be due to using the wrong keywords, providing irrelevant content, or a lack of information.
Consider the consequences of purposely using keywords that are not related to the site’s content. A lot of spammers use this black hat technique; they add meta tags of something like famous celebrity names to a site selling porn in order to drive traffic. If you are doing the same thing, not only could you appear as a spammer, your site may be blacklisted by the search engines.
The content is another usual suspect when it comes to bounces. Maybe your blog was set up as an affiliate marketing portal and you have optimised it for payday loan services. A visitor reaches your site on the premise that it contains advice for consolidating debt. What they find, instead, are advertisements thinly disguised as informative posts. This could certainly result in a high bounce rate.
Then again, the problem could be your website design. If it contains a lot of flash animation, large video clips, and numerous images, it could be taking too long to load on the visitor’s computer. Internet users tend to be impatient and unlikely to wait around until a large page loads; increase page load speed and you will decrease bounce rate.
There may be a problem on a particular page, too, returning a 404 error or a timeout from the server. Test this out by asking friends and family to access your site on a variety of different computers using various browsers.
If you do not take the steps to determine your site’s bounce rate and fix the possible problems, it is not helping your internet marketing efforts. Review your page statistics and take the necessary steps to ensure that all visitors are qualified traffic and once they arrive, they stick around long enough to click on your call to action.
See you at the top of Google!
Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010
Hi Sean,
Is there a particular tool you use to gauge whether your website is loading fast enough? Do you aim to have a page load in say 2 seconds on a 512k connection speed?
.-= David Moloney´s last blog ..What is the Difference Between a JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG and EPS? =-.
This article on how to test and increase page load speed should give you some tips David.
Hi David,
I use a tool called Page Speed which is a FireFox addon. You need have have the FireBug addon installed first.
Page Speed is essentially the same tool that is offered in Google Webmaster Tools – just in a plugin. Hope that helps mate
.-= Cemil´s last blog ..Affili@syd – Affiliate Marketing Conference =-.
Thanks Cemil, you’re a wealth of information
I’ve only read the first two comments and their answers and have found out some priceless information already about tools to reduce the bounce rate on your site.
Thank you Cemil, David and Sean
Cathy
Hi Cemil,
Sean’s right. You are always sharing great information and I really appreciate it. I’m definitely going to take a hard look at Page Speed.
.-= Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Finding Your Passion =-.
This has given me a lot to think about as I have this very problem. Very high bounce rate so I obviously need to look at my content. Thanks Sean
.-= Jackie Stenhouse´s last blog ..Falling Pregnant =-.
I have several sites with a high bounce rate and none that seem pertain to your reasoning listed here. One, the main one I sell products through, I believe simply has too many items for one to bother going through. I also think a lot of people aren’t spending money on novelty items right now. If you have advice for me in this regard I’m all eyes
The other, my own personal site, gets a lot of traffic but I’m still at a loss for regular followers. I just set the site up to allow followers and am on my way, I just am greedy and want more. I write book reviews, would love to start author interviews, ask for opinions on making the Law of Attraction more effective, etc. Something for a lot of of people, if not everyone.
I’m participating whole heartedly in your Learn and Earn competition to figure out what I’m doing right so I can do more of it
.-= Sarah Butland´s last blog ..The Magic of Believing Review =-.
How about promoting just a few of your best selling, or most popular items on the homepage Sarah? When visitors click through to one of the particular items, you could also have links to other relevant items that may interest them.
Certainly an idea I can try playing with. Right now it may just be too busy as it gives a random listing of the most popular and tons of categories; it may be overwhelming.
Thank you
.-= Sarah Butland´s last blog ..The Magic of Believing Review =-.
Thanks for tip on reduce your sites bounce rate.
Considering your page load speed wasn’t something I initially considered as contributor to a page high bounce rate. Though for obvious reason I can definitely now see why.
Although the bounce rate on my sites are quite low I will definitely check my page load speeds, just for interest sake.
.-= Cade´s last blog ..Learn & Earn from Aussie Internet Marketer Sean Rasmussen for free. =-.
I was just wondering if there was any way of knowing if you’ve been blacklisted or even slapped by google? Do you receive a notification somehow or is there a site you go to to check?
There is a plugin I use for my blog that helps speed up my site. It’s called wp super cache and what it does is takes almost a snapshot of your pages and instead of your site having to go deep into the files to pull your pages when a visitor comes to your site, super cache will use that snapshot instead and will increase the speed of your site. Make sure you refer to the plugins main page so you know how to optimize your settings of the plugin.
.-= Landon Steffensen´s last blog ..Dog Food: Is It Hurting Your Dog? =-.
Basically, if you insert your full URL into Google search and if your site shows up, you won’t be blacklisted Landon. WP super cache is a great plugin by the way
Hi Sean,
I have heard you saying that a site can be too busy if I were to have more than one product for sale on it.
I can see how this is true and also it would be harder to target a relative keyword that drives traffic to the site. Is this correct Sean or is it okay to sometimes put more than one product up for sale on a blog-site or homepage?
.-= Jill Brown´s last blog ..Common Law Marriage – What is Common Law Marriage? =-.
If you mean products in your blog sidebar, one is probably best Jill. You could push it and have 2 products, but more than that will more than likely look a little spammy and also give too many options to the reader.
I am truly amazed at there being so many things to know about Internet Marketing. I had never heard about ‘bounce rate’ before and will not forget it now that I am in the process of building my blog.
Blessings
Elly
.-= Elly Wilson´s last blog .. =-.
Hey Sean, on the flipside, is it easy to determine loyal/repeat visitors through Analytics?
Hi David,
Google Analytics has a feature to be able to view new vs return visitors. However I have always doubted the true accuracy of the figures.
.-= Cemil´s last blog ..Scribe SEO Plugin – Making SEO Easy =-.
I can see why a page taking to long to load would be one reason people would leave a page quickly. I have had that situation many times and its frustrating.
I didn’t even know what a bounce rate was till I read this article.
.-= David Pearse´s last blog ..Learn Internet Marketing For Free!!! =-.
I’ve dubbed this the “generation now” even though it feels everyone wants it yesterday. People expect to go online and find their answer and not have to look any further and if that takes them more than a second a lot of them give up. Hard to imagine when so many people are still on dial up and can’t even make a phone call while surfing the net.
If we were able to give out what everyone wanted yesterday, before they even knew it existed, we’d all be billionaires already
.-= Sarah Butland´s last blog ..The Magic of Believing Review =-.
One thing which always irritates is the SLOooooooooooW Loading page. There are sites which are being driven around the internet with their brakes ON, and it’s a guaranteed way of a very high bounce rate – bounce rate is a new term to my IM vocabulary, so thanks for that Sean. [ Love improving my vocabulary ]
Cheers
Harry
.-= Harry Lynn´s last blog ..SEAN RASMUSSEN’S ” LEARN AND EARN ” COMPETITION. =-.
What is a good bounce rate? Is there an industry standard benchmark to try and achieve?
If you are using wordpress, there are some plugins which can help, like Smush It, WP Super Cache and WP Minify which do speed up the page load.
.-= Anthony The Travel Tart´s last blog ..Become Vampire – Or At Least Kill One Yourself With A True Blood Stake in New Zealand =-.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the great tips on how to reduce my bounce rate. Mine is slowly coming down but I have a long way to go. I chose the wrong keywords in the beginning and I’ve definitely paid the price for this.
I’m currently in the process of re-working my keywords so I’m hoping it will reduce my bounce rate even more.
.-= Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Learn and Earn – It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint =-.
Great to hear you have identified some minor problems and are taking action to improve Jazz
Bounce rate is something I got familiar with when using adwords. I know myself that I have seen ads and looked at sites out of curiosity – I was necessarily their target demographic- and so then I bounced off quickly.
In addition to this, I believe that sometimes what the ad promises was not depicted successfully in the site. The ad didnt match the site, nor what I was targeting. A costly lesson, but just one of many. Loving this journey!
Thanks for this Sean
I find that I am getting a lot of visitors but they seem to prefer your sites and disappear quickly. I am going to take your advice and see if I can improve my bounce rate so that they some to my site and stay rather than return to yours, as they all seem to be doing
Thanks for you help.
.-= Dobbs Franks´s last blog ..Musicians Can Entertain Professionally =-.
Hi Sean,
bounce rate is a big issue, but it also gives you great hints on where/what to improve on the site.
I just had a thorough look at my google analytics to see which sites have the highest bounce and i will be re-working these pages.
.-= Renee´s last blog ..Overcoming Procrastination =-.
Thanks for the tips on how to reduce bounce rate Sean,
This is a problem I have been aware of within my internet marketing efforts but was not sure if this was just part of the numbers game or not.
Being my first website there could be a number of reasons for a high bounce rate that I will have to consider but I am wandering what would be an acceptable bounce rate for my site… I guess I will have to figure that one out for myself : )
So much great information on tips on how to reduce bounce rate.
There are certainly many factors that can contribute to this, but at least knowing the sorts of things that may be causing this is a step in the right direction.
The next step is making the necessary changes.
Cath