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Bounce rate tips

All You Need To Know About Bounce Rate & How to Improve Bounce Rate

It’s really easy to attract traffic to your website, but it’s hard to keep the visitor connected for a long time. Most the visitors visit the site and left the page, even without visiting the further pages. If a visitor leaves the page without entering the next page of your website then it will increase the bounce rate of that page. Also, it tends to decrease your page views of per visit which affects your search ranking.

In this article we will share All You Need To Know About Bounce Rate.

But, before jumping on your problems, let us understand bounce rate in detail.

What is bounce rate & ways Google analytics measure it?

The Google Analytics measures the bounce as:

Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

In case you are dealing with a low bounce rate then this indicates that the visitors of your web page are also navigating to other pages. This means that your web page visitors are engaging more with your site and it is a positive sign.

But, if your web page has high bounce rate then it can indicate three things: –

– Maybe the content or the quality of your web page is low, thus; visitors are not engaging with other pages of your website.

– Maybe the purpose of your website is not matching with the visitor’s purpose. In other words, you can say that the targeted audience is not visiting your website.

– Maybe the visitor found the required information and then left.

Is a high bounce rate a bad sign and what is a good average bounce rate?

The common question which pops up in every individual’s mind who owns a website is that whether a high bounce rate is a bad sign or not. Also, what is a good average bounce rate?

Well, it totally depends on the purpose of your website, if the aim of the page is only to inform then high bounce rate is not a bad thing. Definitely, you would like if people will visit, stay and read more articles, blogs, etc., of your website.

For example, If a person has visited the site and explore the first page and received their required information then, obviously they will close the tab. But, if the person has not visited the other pages, so it will be considered as a bounce. Even, if it has 100% bounce rate it is not a bad signal according to the visitor’s point of view because they have found the information they were looking for.

If the motto of your web page is to engage with your site in that case high bounce rate is not a good sign. Let’s assume that you are running a page (landing page) that has a single goal i.e., to capture visitor’s information. Now, if your landing page has a high bounce rate then you need to optimize such type of pages.

  • Connecting through phone calls to inquire about your products or services.
  • Clicking on the affiliate links which redirect visitors to affiliate sites etc.
  • Filling a contact form that does not take the visitor to another page, for instance, thank you page.
  • Redirecting users from your site to other sites to buy your products on other platforms such as Flipkart, Amazon, etc., where you provide your entire product list.

In other words, if the motto of your web page is only to make people visit the first page, then you don’t have to worry about bounce rate. But, if you have some other objectives as well, then you might face bounce issues.

Is your bounce rate getting affected by the search result ranking?

According to the Search Engine Roundtable article, the answer is no.

There are a number of users who did not include the Google Analytics code on their website, hence Google has no other way to measure bounce rate of such websites. Sometimes it is difficult for Google analytics also to determine that what bounce rate mean really. Even if you have 100% bounce rate it is not a bad signal always.

Suppose a visitor who is seeking for some information which is available on your website he goes to the page and after finding the required information lefts the page. You may have 100% bounce rate in such cases, but if the visitor is satisfied then that’s alright.

Still, several marketers say that the usage data like bounce rates, number of visits, page sessions etc., will influence the rankings of their websites in some ways. But still, there are no proper facts for that. So, you need to make sure that whenever the visitor visits your website through search engines, they don’t bounce back to search results. As such type of bouncing is a ranking factor which can be measured in a different way like “Dwell Time” or Click Back (long versus short clicks) than the bounce rate. It is mandatory to optimize every inch of your website as by doing so; it will help in improving your website SEO ranking.

What does bounce rate mean in Google analytics and ways to Measure bounce rate in Google Analytics?

To measure the bounce rate of a web page you have to log in to your Google Analytics account. After the sign-in process, you will visit the home page itself, where you will find the average bounce rate of your website.

Average Bounce Rate

If you are keenly interested to understand about bounce rate, then it is not sufficient to know only average bounce rate. For that, you need to grab deeper knowledge of Google analytics.

Here are few things you can learn from your bounce rate:-

Measuring bounce rate for individual pages or posts

To measure the bounce rate of individual pages or posts you need to go to:

Behavior> Site Content >All page> Pages in your Google analytics.

Measure bounce rate for individual pages or posts

Now you can see the list of pages or posts of your website and page views of every month with their bounce rate as well. In this picture you can see the following mentioned below: –

– The home page of last 30 days of my site my site has the bounce rate of 30%, which indicates that the 70% of the visitors explore other pages of the website.

– On the other hand, my first blog- Create and design professional resume for free has a bounce rate of almost 87.50% this month after people read the post.

– The average time of the page indicates, the average time spent on the particular page or blog. In case the average time of the page is low with high bounce rate then, it means that the visitors leave the page without reading the content of your web page.

– By knowing the bounce rate and average time you can find out that, which pages of your site need improvement. You should improve the bounce rate of pages with a high volume of page views. Also, the pages of your site which are getting more attention will lead the visitors to visit the other pages of your site as well.

Bounce rate can be used as a tool to measure success from a conversion point of view. Suppose you have made some design and pattern changes on your website believing that it will serve a positive result. But, for that, you have to keep a track on the bounce rate of that particular page. Therefore, an increase in bounce rate indicates that the changes you have made are not positive.

Source of traffic

It is important to know that which source of traffic has brought a number of visitors on your website and vice-a-versa. By measuring this you can measure the respective bounce rate from each traffic source.

To measure this you will need to navigate on Acquisition> All Traffic> Source/Medium.

Sources of traffic and bounce rate

From the above data you can easily find out the following: –

In the above picture, you can see that Google and artist Leonardo have visited my website more and they are the top referrers with a low bounce rate.

Whereas, Digital Deepak has more bounce rate with fewer page sessions.

Through this part, we get to know that which source of traffic is bringing more visitors, who are spending more time on your site. Also, we will understand that whether the visitors of our site meet their expectations. I offer the contents which Google users appreciate more rather than other users. With such techniques, you can get to know which source of a queue is suitable for your site.

You will observe that throughout the Google analytics data everything is interconnected to bounce rate. Bounce rate keeps using Google analytics to know the demographics of your website through analytics.

How to improve bounce rate?

Steps to improve bounce rate is: –

Target right audience

A person faces the problem of high bounce rate because people who are visiting their website are not the targeted audience. To have a right target audience is important and especially, while running campaigns, ads or creating content for your website. Always target the right people for better results.Half of your problem will be solved if you choose the right audience on the correct platform to distribute it.

Proper Meta title and description

Optimizing the Meta tags and description of web pages are very important. Meta tags are the short description of the web page. It is important to write meta tags because people get misguided without such tags, which leads them to bounce back to the search results.

So, instead of allowing Google to write meta tags, try to write it yourself for all the pages separately.

A technique to write perfect meta tags: –

If you are using WordPress then you can use Yoast SEO plugin. Using, this plugin you can provide unique Meta tags (title and description) for every page and post

Follow these tips: –

By using, the free version of Yoast SEO you can focus on one keyword for a particular page. Focus keyword is a word on whose foundation your page or blog is ranked in SEO. So, use the keyword research tool and find some strong keywords. Also, do some research based on search volume, competition and keyword difficulty, etc.

Once you find the right keyword for your page, enter that keyword in the focus keyword section.

Now, you have to write the Meta title and description. Keep the following in mind while writing the meta tags.

Include the target keyword: To write proper meta tags are important as it is the major factor to boost the ranking of your page and blogs. Remember to include the focus keyword in Meta tags. Also, make sure that this does not lead to keyword stuffing in meta tags. Just adding focus keyword is sufficient in meta tags. For example, let’s say that your Focus keyword is- Fails to Generate Leads. Here’s how to write Meta tags- In the above picture, you can see that I have mentioned the focus keyword ‘once’ in the meta tags. In my meta description, you can see the flow of keyword in my content and it does not seem to be devious. Such type of meta description helps to increase the CTR and decrease the bounce rate. Through this, a website visitor will come to know what the site is about and visits accordingly. Hence writing proper Meta description is important.

Speed up your page load time

Here are some hard facts which show the importance of site speed for the user:

Around 47% of users, expect your website to load in less than 2 seconds.

Almost 40 % of people, will leave if it will take more than 3 seconds.

More than 80% of people, expect a mobile link to download faster than on the desktop.

Source: Kissmetrics.com

If the speed of your site is slow then, definitely you will lose traffic to your site. We don’t have time to wait, nor we, have time to wait for results. This is quite easily visible when we peep in telecom industries they are now providing high-speed internet, which is faster than our imagination. Now just think of its reverse case will you choose such internet network?

In the same way, if the speed of your site, especially the landing pages than it gives a bad signal to Google. Also, such small issues can lower your ranking and can affect your marketing as well. Less traffic will drive your sales away and it’s not the only speculation. Many of the renowned companies have tested it, so it’s better to be on the safe side.

Amazon did few tests which showed that they would lose $1.6 BILLION every year if they slow down their speed even by one second.

So, keep your speed up to date as it will affect your sales and conversions. Apart from this your visitor’s experience and your search ranking will also be affected.

Ways to measure website speed: –

There are many online tools available to check your website speed. One of them is the Pingdom Speed Test Tool.

Go to the home page, there in the URL section; type your site URL (e.g., guruandchela.com). Click the “START TEST” button. Now, wait for a while until Pingdom completes the test.

In the below picture you can see my website guruandchela.com had taken 2.16 seconds to load. Whereas the ideal load time is maximum 2 seconds only. If your website takes much higher time to load than this, then you need to optimize your site to decrease the load time and increase the website speed.

Ways to increase website speed and lower your bounce rate

Through these ways you can speed up your website: –

By optimizing all the images you can increase the website speed. If you are using WordPress then, you can use WordPress plugins which will make your work easy.

By Minify JavaScript and CSS. Minification helps in extra acting non-essential characters from code to minimize its size as a result improves load time.

Prioritize visible content

Leverage browser caching

Minify HTML

Simply reduce server response time and enable Gzip compression

Speed up your website by lightening up your site pages, compressing images and video wherever possible.

By modifying the .htaccess file

Make your website to support for AMP.

Any question or views regarding load speed or server response times, then don’t forget to leave a comment.

Set External Links / Outbound links to open in new tab or new window

If you have external links on your website then make sure to open them in new tabs. If you are opening the external links in the same tab, then the user is automatically, leaving your site which will lead to increase in your website bounce rate.

Make sure that the external links/Outbound links on your site are opened in a new tab or window so that the visitor can easily come back to your site instead of leaving it. Thus, it will also help to improve the bounce rate of your site.

If you are a WordPress user, then you can install the WP external links plugin by default as it will set all your external links to open in a new window.

And, if you want to do it manually then, just set the target attribute to “_blank”, which will automatically open the link in a new window. Below is the code:

<a href=”https://www.facebook.com/guruandchela” target=”_blank”>Check Our Facebook Page</a>

Add More Internal links

Internal links play an important role because these links will link to other web pages of the same site. Through this, you can easily link one article with another in the same post. By interlinking your web pages, the visitors can go to other pages of your site to explore and it will not reduce the bounce rate instead it will increase the visitors to your web page. If you wish, you can also add several sections such as mandatory articles, top stories, motivational, etc.

One of the main reasons why the user leaves your blog after reading the post is because you are not showing them what to do next. By showing the user with a list of “Related posts” or “other popular posts”, you may get them to go on to visit another post on your site.

Hence, adding more internal links is beneficial.

Update Product pages

If you own an eCommerce website then it is not necessary that people will directly buy your product by just seeing product image and discounted price. Many of them may not.

To increase the sales you have to focus on improving the bounce rate of the product pages. Try to add as much as information you can, like a description of the product, provide a guide how to use that product, Customers Feedback, and rating etc. Care for these small things and you will face no such problems. By adding these things you can make the visitor stay longer on your website which will increase the average time duration. Moreover, by reading such information customers can buy the product.

On the product page remember to mention links for “Related Products” or “Buy this with this” something like that. By adding the following sections you are trying to sell more products. But, these sections are interlinks only which will decrease the bounce rate.

Updating Old Posts

It is important to keep your websites, as well as the old posts updated with fresh and new information. If you will not update the posts, then visitors might leave your website soon as they are not getting the required updated information. Hence, by updating old posts you can engage your visitors.

Conclusion

Bounce rate is a technique which is used to analyze your marketing skills. Through this, you can easily measure bounce rate, website speed, page load time, etc., if you’re living up to your visitor’s expectations.

Through bounce rate analysis you can see which pages or posts need more attention. By taking care of the visitor’s expectation you can attract visitors towards your website, which will make your website unique. Also, the unique website is ranked higher.

If you find this article helpful, please share your view in the comment box.

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