We’re constantly told that the higher the bounce rate, the worse your site is doing. But there are more to bounce rates than just that. These simple percentages hold the key to assisting you improve your online marketing strategies.
What exactly is a Bounce Rate?
If you head over and check your overview report on Google Analytics you’ll see a bounce rate in the form of a percentage. This number is the percentage of viewers that visit your site but leave without having interacted. It is an average of all the pages on your site but page-specific bounce rates can be accessed too.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
A good bounce rate can be tricky to determine. There are many factors which come into play, including the type of business, industry and location. For example, the average bounce rate for a vehicle-related site is 46.34% while the average bounce rate for a news site is significantly higher at 65.35%. It’s safe to assume a general bounce rate of below 50% is considered good.
Track your Bounce Rates
Effectively tracking your bounce rates is the first step to transforming them. You’ll need to narrow down the general bounce rate given by Google Analytics into segments. You can segment your visitor data into brackets of age, gender, affinity, location, new and returning visitors, browser, device, landing pages and acquisition. With these segments you can track if your page is reaching your desired target market or not.
You can also choose what deems worthy of an interaction, such as watching a video, clicking on a link or commenting on a post. Then users who complete these actions will be left off your bounce rate. There are also options to add tags, which keep viewers that have scrolled to a certain point on your site off the bounce rate. A timer trigger will also ensure that all viewers that stay on your page for a certain length of time will not be added to the bounce rate percentage.
Boost Your Conversions
Now that you’ve identified what segments of viewers are bouncing more than others and deflected any ‘unworthy’ bounces. You can focus on boosting your bounce conversions. The first thing you should do is review the exit page report to see which pages on your site are being most quickly abandoned. This should show you where improvements are needed the most.
The next report to check is the in-page analytics report. You’ll need a Google Chrome plugin but the report is helpful as it provides data for every link on your landing page. From here you can see which links are hits and which are misses- and rephrase CTAs and anchor texts accordingly.
You may also need to check your page timing. People may be deserting your page because it is taking too long to load. If so, have a look at resizing images and videos. Test your website loading speeds here. Connect with us if your score is bad. We can assist you with speeding up your website.
On top of that, ensure that all your text is easy to read and your site is visually appealing overall. No one wants to scroll through an ugly website that has no purpose or end goal of guiding the user to where you want him/her to go. Give them a reason to stay on your website by having a great website design built for your business.
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