Reduce Website Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate, a well-known Analytics grade to all people in the blogosphere. Surprisingly, this is the only figure in the entire web analytics tool that needs to be reduced. The rest of the figures like Visits, Page Views, and Time on Site, Pages/visits etc…need to be increased all the time.

And many people ignore the word that high bounce rate affects Google Adsense income, which is partially true. This high bounce rate will indirectly impact Adsense earnings, because if people leave your website without engaging in it, then who will be there for you to click on the ads. So in one or the other way, it affects the Adsense income.

How Bounce Rate is calculated?

Bounce Rate is a metric used to measure the quality of visits a website receives. High bounce rate normally indicates that the landing page or the entrance page is neither relevant nor useless and make the visitors navigate towards another website.

Bounce Rate is calculated as the amount of visitors who leave a website immediately if they don’t find it interesting or annoying. This percentage criteria helps us to calculate the websites quality score. The bounce-rate must be calculated by associating it the time on site: if the bounce rate is low (more in our case) but visitor length (stay) is more, then we have to consider that as the user did not the find what he is searching for and moving from one page to another. The longer the user stays on the site and the more a low bounce rate has a positive meaning.

Points to be remembered

• Duration of a visits or time spent on a page itself doesn’t affect bounce rate.
• Bounce rate also depends on the type of niches. Ex: Entertainment niches will have less bounce rate where as content-related or technology blogs will have higher bounce rate.

Case Studies: Bounce Rate Scenarios

• Case 1: A visitor spent 1 hour on a single page and after he is satisfied, he closes the page. This is treated as bounce by Google Analytics because he didn’t view another page in the site.
• Case 2: A visitor spent 30 seconds on a website by visiting two different pages one after the other. His visit will not be considered a bounce because he visited more than 1 page on your site.
• Case 3: A visitor landed on a web page where he viewed a video for about 30 minutes and then left without visiting another post, and then it is also treated as bounce.

So, how would you tackle situations like in Case 3? Here comes the “Event tracking” to the rescue. You can track events like Flash, Ajax, Videos, Banners etc.Using event tracking in Google Analytics. So even though the visitor clicked away from the page after watching the video, GA Event Tracking will actually calculate the duration of the visit and reflects it in the bounce rate marking it as not bounce.

Extras: See this video tutorial to know how to setup Event Tracking on your website.

There are many reasons of why a user leaves a website/page without responding to anything. Below you’ll both the reasons and solutions.

Tips to Reduce Website Bounce Rate

1. Page Design: A pleasant page design/presentation attracts the visitors to your site and also helps to stay for some time at least for the attracting design.

2. Loading Time: Improve your webpage load time. If your website takes more time to load, users may get bored and may close the tab instantly and move to another webpage. Remember that you’re not the only person who provides the solution to the users problem. There are many websites available on the net where people can get help. So try to decrease it..

3. Interesting Topic: Write interesting topics for the sake of the users as well as for search engines. If your message is said in a convincing mode, it’s very easy for a user to read more about it or to buy your product.

4. Related Posts: Use WordPress related posts plugin below the posts which help readers to engage more. If yours is a blogger blog, you can use “Linkwithin” to get related posts.

5. Size of the content: This was another important factor that increases bounce rate. Remember that all users will not have enough time to read such a long stories. So make it simple. Convey what you have to say in a simple and short manner (in my view, a 500 word article is more than enough until unless you’re writing some detailed tutorial for beginners like the one you’re reading now).

6. List the Popular Posts: Use most popular posts plugin which helps users to view the most popular pages on your site. A working strategy to keep visitors on your site for more time. Blogger users can simply go to Layout > Add a Gadget > Choose ‘Popular Posts’.

7. Clean Advertisements: Publicity is nothing but advertising. Don’t stuff advertisements here and there which make the user get confused? Always try to set the ads in a proper way with clean layout. The ads should stay aside from the content, so that the user can click the ads if he likes it.

8. Stuffed keywords: Don’t overdo keyword stuffing. This not only gets your site penalized by search engines, but also the users feel it annoying while reading. Write the content in a neat way which is readable by users, not the SE’s. So when you write for the user, the content will automatically become search engine friendly.

9. Link Color: It is a very common mistake many webmasters do these days. People are used to the links that are in blue color and are underlined. They tend to click the link that is underlined in blue color. If you use different colors in your page, many users (beginners) don’t know what to click and in a Confucius way move out of your site in search of another one.

Ex: See the Amazon.com and Google.Com and many big company websites which show their links in color blue. Even though many disagree with this last factor, I strongly believe this as an important factor that improves our click rate as well as bounce rate.

10. Easy Navigation: Link to your internal pages from every post wherever appropriate and also use the related posts feature. So whenever the user find its difficult to find the content, he can use the navigation to find whatever he needs. A great way that works well in improving SEO score and Analytics.

Finally, create compelling content as it itself make the users to stay more time on your website.

So, always make sure you optimized your website for above factors. These factors will definitely improve the percentage of your Bounce Rate.

What is the Suggested Bounce Rate Percentage?

As per my knowledge and from few experts suggestion, the suggested percentage for a bounce rate should be 50% or less but it varies based on the type of your niche.

For example, like I said in the starting of this post under points to be remembered, ET blogs should have around 18% or lesser bounce rate while the ideal bounce rate for a technology or content-rich blog should be 45-60% or even less.

Reason: Users normally spend more time on entertainment blogs where as in technology blogs, people come looking for a solution and once they found it, they just read and leave.

Will Google penalize sites that have Low Bounce Rate?

To be frank, Not completely yes. But, it does have slight impact on your rankings.

Do share your ideas about reducing bounce rate of your website so that others can get benefited from your experience.

Slash Bounce Rate
A bounce — when a visitor quickly leaves your site — might be used by Google to gauge a page’s quality. After all, if someone finds your site from Google and quickly clicks away, how good could your site be?
“Bounce rate isn’t the end-all-be-all of user experience metrics…but it matters. Adding internal links to the beginning of your content is one the easiest and most effective ways to decrease your bounce rate and improve time on site.
I think when people first get to a page they’re more “click happy” then when they’re deeper in an article. That’s why internal links at the beginning of your articles tend to get clicked more often…slashing bounce rate significantly.“

Dwell Time: Bounce rate is important…but it’s not the end-all-be-all of user experience signals.

Why?

Because Google also uses “short clicks” vs. “long clicks” (also known as dwell time). Dwell time simply measures how long a searcher stays on your page before hitting the back button.

If someone hits their back button immediately after landing on your page, it’s a sign of a low quality page.

You can increase your average dwell time by writing long, engaging content that keeps people reading.

That way — even if they bounce back to the search results — you at least have a “long click”. That long click shows Google that you gave them something of value while they were there.