What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate is simply a Digital Marketing Term, used by analysts and in web traffic analysis. It represents those visitors who enter the site and leave the site without continuing to visit other pages of the website.
Calculating Bounce Rate is easy, just take the total number of Single Page Visit and divide that by the Total Visits to get a value. The value is then converted to a percentage to get Bounce Rate.
Having a High bounce rate on your website is not a good thing, so let’s look at some steps in order to decrease the bounce rate:
1) Decrease Webpage Load Time
When the bounce rate is high, most Website owners or Marketers think that there is something wrong with the content. However, the issue might be that the user does not even get to read the page’s content at all.
This happens when the page speed is slow and takes time to load. According to a survey, 47% of visitors expect a webpage to load under 2 seconds otherwise they would look for an alternative faster website.
To tackle this problem, optimize your website and webpage. Check your score and how you stand out using a tool like Pingdom – Check your Website Speed for Free Here.
2) Use Smart Formatting to Make your Content more Readable to Users
Always make sure that your content is easy to read and the user when navigating to a post shouldn’t be greeted with an intimidating wall of text.
This discourages the user to go through your post even though your content is more superior and unique than others.
In order to achieve readability for your content, format your pages to be as welcoming as possible and accessible. The more “work” the user has to do to get what they want, the more likely they will switch to another website.
Here are some formatting tips to use in your Posts:
- Appropriate use of headers
- Frequent subheadings
- Suitable images
- Bulleted lists
3) Make Use of your Non-Content Space Wisely
Usage of Non-Content Space also plays an important role, as these spaces are usually reserved for Sidebar Widgets and Ads.
If a user visiting your website feels like your sidebar widget is too intrusive, the user will exit the site for another one. If you feel like that the widgets are essential for your website and want to retain it, always provide an option to close the widget on the website.
So the visitor who feels like the widget is intrusive he/she can close the widget and continue using the website as normal or keep using the widget if they find it useful.
The second thing to take care of is of Placement of Ads on your website. Always be aware of what ad type you place on your websites and the number of ads on your website. Too much irrelevant Ads on your website can annoy the visitors and may lead them to leave the website increasing the bounce rate. Ads of Pop-Up nature can force the customer to leave the website even faster.
4) Make your Website Mobile Friendly
We have been repeating this statement for a few times in our previous posts and we can’t stress enough. Users on mobile are increasing every day and with mobile, they get access to the internet through these devices. In such an era of mobile devices, your Website should be Mobile Friendly Period!
When a User navigates to your site on a mobile device and if your website is not mobile friendly, then the user would leave the website within a couple of seconds without giving a second thought.
5) Make Surfing Through your Website a Breeze
The current generation of users has been long exposed to instant-gratification and they expect the world to be the same.
When these users visit your website they expect to not do much work and receive what they were looking for (almost like spoon-feeding). So in order to achieve this for the users, you have to make the navigation on your website a breeze and simpler.
6) Optimize for Relevance
Be sure to optimize your results for relevance in search engines. Irrelevant keywords can bring you irrelevant traffic onto your websites. When this traffic visits your website they find out that your website/webpage is not relevant to their query, forcing them to leave the website.
When you get ranked for a keyword and come on top, be sure that webpage host content that serves the seeker’s query. If the content is relevant, they are more likely to stick around and explore your website.
7) Revamp your Product Pages
Designing your product pages can be tricky. If you put too much information the customer feels bombarded or offer too little and the customer feels like there is not much enough information to make an informed decision.
When a customer is on a product page and they do not complete the transaction it could be as simple as a reason such as aversion to the price or buyer’s hesitation. However, it could also be linked with the lack of description provided about the product. This description can be anywhere between from manufacturer country to customer reviews.
8) Design Landing Pages which Satisfy the User’s Query
When you get the right traffic to your website but the page the visitor ends up with does not satisfy the customer’s query, then the visitors are going to bounce right off the second they arrive onto your website.
For Example: When a visitor is looking for information on “courses of digital marketing” and your landing page provides general information about digital marketing courses, then there is a high chance the visitor is going to bounce.
9) Check if your Call to Action(CTA) is relevant to your landing page
CTAs can attract or bounce visitors, depending upon how it is implemented. Let’s explain with an example below:
Suppose you are running an ad on Google Adwords stating “Get your free Webinar Access Now”, but a user clicks on the CTA and it leads them to the homepage of your website instead of the free access page. This scenario would create a high number of bounces for your website.
10) Create Short Content in order to reduce Reading Time
Suppose your landing page satisfy the user’s query, but the content is hard to take in a short span of time than ready to face a high bounce rate on your website.
Some users might be still interested in your content and bookmark it to read later, however, the bookmark just goes on to the bottom of the list and eventually the user forgets about it.
So always intended to create a content that can be absorbed without much time for the user.
Feel free to Contact us, if you still have any Query. We would love to hear from you.