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A Bounce and Your Bounce Rate Defined

A bounce is when a visitor hits your site, and either hits the "back" button in their browser or types a new URL in their browser to leave your site. (Note: Google Analytics measures a bounce as any individual who stays less than 10 seconds on your page.) Let's state it as a formula.


What does the Bounce Rate Reveal?

E-Commerce Site

1. If you have an e-commerce site the bounce rate should be low. Why? an e-commerce site whole purpose is to sell products. That is their only purpose. Thus, a low bounce rate is key to the success of their business model.

In general terms, if a bounce rate is high, it's an element of concern. If the bounce rate is low, than you can assume that the landing page is drawing visitors into the site to view more pages. And the content you are offering, and the keywords you are using is drawing the target market you are wanting.

1. Am I offering links to move the visitor forward?
2. Am I using the wrong keywords?  In other words, are the keywords relevant to the content being offered.
3. Look at your content. Do you need to revise your content, are there typos in your content, does not content make sense. Note: In the heat of creating your masterpiece, you can be blinded by your brilliance. Let you masterpiece rest for a couple of days before putting it online. You may find holes in your masterpiece.
4. Where are the visitors coming from? If the visitors are coming from a source that is of low interest or did they accidentally find your site-that bounce rate can be ignored.
5. Did the click come through your search link.  If the the click came through from a specific method of marketing and you have a high bounce rate, it's time to analyze and improve where you can.

So what is the bottom line? Your landing pages have to either give the visitor what they are looking for, or the links that will move them to where you want the visitor to go. If this is not happening with your website or blog, it's time to improve your landing page, web pages or blog posts. (This, is all part of the learning process.)


Ways to Improve your Bounce Rate-Let's Look at Your Landing Pages

Once all the analysis is done, it time to see if you can improve your landing page. Here are some simple things to consider to get you moving on the right track.

Information Site-What To Look At To Improve Your Bounce Rate

1. Improve your website load time. This is becoming more and more important to Google from a measurement standpoint as well as, your bounce rate. If your website takes to long to load, don't anticipate visitors to stay around and wait for the graphics, video, etc to load.

2. Navigation-Simply put, if a visitor can find what they are looking in at most, three clicks, forget it, they are gone.

3. Break-up large articles- Breaking up large articles serves several purposes-it helps control information overload and most importantly, leads them to click another page to continue reading the information they want.

4. Contextual links- If you have anchor text links within your content that leads to another page within your website you will not only lead readers to more information but it helps with keyword relevance for search engines.

5. Meta tags- As always, your meta tags should be relevant to the content that you have on the page.

6. Keywords - tailor your keywords to your pages. 


E-commerce Site-What To Look At To Improve Your Bounce Rate

1. Navigation- navigation with an e-commerce site is extremely important. If a visitor cannot find what they are looking in at most, three clicks, forget it, they are gone.

2. Checkout - Is your checkout functioning correctly? Sound like a silly question? It's not. I will not stay around to checkout, if the checkout does not work correctly. Two things are happening here:

 1) A red flag may be issued by the user.
 2) Don't have time to be frustrated trying to get through checkout for a sale.