Are you struggling to convert your website visitors into customers? The traffic reaches your website but exits your website before performing any action. It means that your website visitor bounces off the website even before you have a chance of converting them. The percentage of people bouncing off from your website is calculated by a metric called “Bounce Rate”.
What is Bounce & Bounce Rate?
According to Google Analytics, a bounce is a single page session on your website. In analytical terms, a bounce is calculated by Google analytics when the session triggers only one request to the analytical server. That is, a user landing your web page and then exiting it without performing any action. A bounce rate is nothing but single-page sessions divided by all the sessions of a website or it is a percentage of all the sessions in which a user exited your website without triggering any further request.
Does Bounce Rate Affect Google Ranking?
While a low bounce rate may not directly boost your website ranking but it certainly has some indirect effect on SEO. A high bounce rate indicates Google that your website is not user-friendly and may hold back your websites’ progress.
What is a Good Bounce Rate on Google Analytics?
As per Google analytics, anything between 20-40% is an acceptable bounce rate. 41-55% is roughly average, 56-70% is below average and above 70% is the worst for any website, blog or news media.
How to Find Bounce Rate in Google Analytics?
Google analytics is the best tool to analyze your website’s bounce rate. It shows you the metrics of your overall website performance and also individual metrics. A web analyzer can understand the important metrics in Analytics and implement corrective measures.
If you want to view your bounce rate in Google analytics, follow these basic steps;
- Sign in to your Google Analytics account and choose the website for which you would like to check the bounce rate.
- On the left-hand side of the home page, you will see a menu, choose Behavior > Overview
- This represents the total bounce rate of your website.
- If you want to check bounce rate for your individual pages, click Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Here the bounce rate for each individual page is shown along with other metrics
If you want to see the bounce rate for a different time period, feel free to change the date range from the top right-hand corner.
How do you Decrease Your Website bounce rate?
High bounce rate is a problem for many websites, even though your website is SEO optimized; you are not able to take full advantage of your property. As a web analyzer or a digital marketer, there are a few things which you can implement in order to decrease your bounce rate.
- Make your content Readable
One of the reasons why users bounce off your website is due to the lack of readability. Large chunks of texts in closed space scares the reader away. Remember that people don’t like to read the text on the website, they just scan. Make sure that you follow a good hierarchy in your content. If it is a Blog post, make sure the heading, sub-heading and the body content is clearly divided. White space is your friend, having content written in closed space will strain a readers eye and they will bounce off your website.
- Create a Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA)
As mentioned above, the reader just scans the website and therefore you need to attract your customers within a fraction amount of time. Using a compelling CTA will attract the users and provoke them to take an action.
The CTA must be clearly visible and should be designed with proper colours and action verbs. Your user interface must clearly tell the user where the CTA lies and what benefit he gets by clicking on them.
- Use Relevant Keywords to attract the right audience
High bounce rate is the result of your website not attracting the right users. If the user visiting your website is not interested in the product or service you are providing, they will definitely exit your website.
One of the ways to attract relevant users is to target customers with highly relevant keywords. The title tag and Meta description must summarize your website’s purpose even before a user clicks the link. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze your website performance and see which keywords users are typing to visit your website.
Google Analytics will give you an insight into your web analytics and you can check the bounce rate for individual pages. The mistakes in the webpage with highest bounce rate should be analyzed and corrective measures must be implemented on all web pages.
- Nurture your audience with helpful content
This is a great way of decreasing your bounce rate. If your content is having a positive impact on the user and helping them to solve a problem or clear their doubts, they will surely stay on your website longer.
Your content must be engaging and address all the problems your users have and it should also compel your visitors to perform an action like downloading an e-book, filling up a lead form or subscribing to a newsletter etc.
You can again use Google analytics tool for website analysis and see your top performing content. Understand why this specific content is performing so well and then implement it across other content ideas.
- Increase page loading speed
Today with high-speed internet browsing, consumers expect a web page to load within 3 seconds. Even Google considers page loading speed as a ranking factor for websites. The longer you make them wait, the more frustrated your users will be and they will immediately jump to your competitor’s website.
- Make your site mobile-friendly
Make sure your website is accessible from multiple devices. Mobile searches have already surpassed desktop searches in 2015 and with Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm, the search engine ranks the website which has a responsive design. If your website elements are not aligned for the mobile screen, there are high chances that users visiting your site through mobile devices will abandon your website without performing any action and thus increase your bounce rate.
Conclusion
In this article, I have explained what is bounce rate, how to find your website bounce rate by Google analytics and some useful tips to reduce the bounce rate. Thorough website analysis is necessary on content, technical as well as design part of your website. Failure in implementing appropriate strategies is the only reason why most people have a higher bounce rate. Use tools like Google analytics to begin your understanding of bounce rate. Website analysis is a continuously going process, so it is important to try and keep on experimenting with new theories and strategies related to content and design.
