Looking at Bounce Rates to Improve Your Sites Effectiveness
The percentage of single page visits in which a person left your site from the entrance page is considered your bounce rate. This helps you to measure your visit quality. If your website has a high bounce rate, chances are your landing page is not relevant to your visitors. This can impact your long term search success as Google accounts for your bounce rate as a part of assigning a rank to your page.
Bounce Rate Equation
The below equation is used to compute your bounce rate.
Bounce Rate = Total number of visits viewing one page only / Total entries to page.
What Causes Visitors to Bounce
Multiple reasons exist with a viewer bouncing from your site. This can be caused by clicking on a link to another website, clicking “back” to leave the site, or closing a browser tab or window. Typing a new URL or a session timeout can also cause visitors to bounce.
Bounce Metrics of an average website
Average time on site: 190.4 seconds
Average page views: 4.6
Bounce rate: 40.5%
New visits: 62.9%
Bounce Rate by Industry
Retail sites
Distinguishing characteristic: Bringing well targeted traffic.
Average bounce rate: 20-40%
Simple landing pages
Distinguishing characteristic: A single call to action.
Average bounce rate: 70-90%
Portals
Distinguishing characteristic: Similar to MSN and Yahoo groups.
Average bounce rate: 10-30%
Service sites
Distinguishing characteristic: Dedicated to self service or FAQs.
Average bounce rate: 10-30%
Content websites
Distinguishing characteristic: High search visibility but for irrelevant terms.
Average bounce rate: 40-60%
Lead generation
Distinguishing characteristic: Advertising services for sale.
Average bounce rate: 30-50%
How to Improve Your Bounce Rate
10 Factors That Affect Your Bounce Rate.
1. Ads, surveys, music, and streaming video.
2. Your page rank and how relevant your keywords are.
3. Audience category.
4. Layout of the landing page.
5. Content on ads and landing pages.
6. Emails and newsletters.
7. Website page loading time.
8. External site links.
9. Page purpose.
10. Streaming music or video.
5 Tips to Improve Your Bounce Rate.
1. Use branded terms for top rankings.
2. Give content that is relevant to your product or service.
3. Have a simple website navigation with a path or menu.
4. Place a noticeable search function on the page.
5. Remove pop-up ads and reduce external links or make them open in a new window.
Now that you have a better knowledge base about bounce rates and how they work, you can easily improve yours after following the above tips. If you work to bring more relevancy to your visitors, then it won’t be long until you see your bounce rate drop and your viewer quality rise.
