Bounce rate by definition is the percentage of visitors quickly leaving the entry page of your site due to some reasons, and this indicates the performance of your site in terms of capturing the right audience, as well as in maintaining their attention span and interests. But to better understand what this data means, it is best to gain some insights on the most frequent incidences or actions by the site visitors that contribute to this rate.
Bounce Rate Occurs When . . .
- visitors leave your site by typing a new url
- visitors click on the back button of their browsers
- visitors closes the window of your site and opens a new window
- visitors click a link in your site that leads to another site, eventually leaving your website
- session is timed-out due to long loading time
There are reasons why these actions occur, and it is important to know the triggers in order to formulate a more effective plan to improve the rate.
Common reasons for High Bounce Rate
- Presence of annoying pop-ups and massive ads
- Non-targeted audience due to wrong use of keywords
- Inferior graphics and design
- Poor quality contents
- Poor landing page design
- No call to action
- Poorly organized website that is hard to navigate
- Too many links to external sites
- Longer loading time
- Highly commercialized websites with only few contents
Average Bounce Rate
Accordingly, higher rate may indicate that your site or its pages are not relevant to your visitors, while a lower rate may tell that you are quite effective in maintaining the momentum of your visitors’ interests by providing them the right information. However, not all the time that a higher rate means bad news; this leads us to the issue on the ideal level that provides guarantee that the blog is doing well.
This actually varies depending on several factors that include the niche where your site belongs to, the kind of site that you have such as a web content blog or a commercial site, the pages in your site like the customer support page or the landing page, and the kind of outbound links that you have in your blog.
While some experts would say that the acceptable level is 40%, this is pointless to use as a benchmark because it differs by industry and type of blog. The ideal benchmark to follow is the one recommended by Google Analytics:
- Landing Page – 70 to 90%
- Blogs – 70 to 98%
- Retail Sites – 20 to 40%
- Informational Sites – 40 to 60%
- Service Websites – 10 to 30%
- Lead Generation Sites – 30 to 50%
How to Improve Bounce Rate
This data is one of the important measures when analyzing your site, which you must regularly check every now and then. If a higher rate is a bad sign, then you should do something to improve it by modifying the pages that caused such poor performance. Don’t worry because there are several things that you can do to improve it and eventually enjoy better conversion rate. Listed below are some proven techniques that work in most cases to improve site bounce rates.
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Eliminate pop-ups
Pop-ups come in various types. They can be in the form of an advertisement, a short survey, or an invitation to a subscription. While pop-ups are sometimes effective in getting clicks such as in CPM or PPC campaign, many visitors find it distracting and very annoying that most end up leaving the site. It is important to test your pop-up ads to see if it is the culprit of such higher rate. Better yet, take it out and observe if the rate improves.
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Properly organize your site
Organize your site properly through effective categorization of posts. Make sure that users find your blog easy to navigate. It is suggested to guide your readers how to navigate your blog so that they can quickly visit the page or post that captures their interests.
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Provide highly-relevant and good quality contents
Adding good and valuable contents can help keep your bounce rate low. Better yet, add links to other posts to keep visitors within your site. Ideally, create longer yet interesting posts filled with exciting facts, trending news or new updates in the market and your visitors will stay longer in your site.
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Minimize non-relevant outbound links
If many people leave your site through one of the outbound links in your post, then your blog will have higher rate. If you want to lower this data then minimize the outbound links as much as possible. But if you are promoting an affiliate product, a higher rate may also indicate that you have successfully directed your prospects to the affiliate program you are promoting. Thus, you must also check the conversion rate of your affiliate products in order justify the high bounce rate of your blog, which in this case is good news.
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Speed up the loading time of your website
There are several websites that take minutes to completely load. As a result, visitors end up hitting the back button to check the other sites, thereby losing potential valuable traffic. Check the loading time of your blog, which should only be within few seconds; otherwise, you will be losing a lot of visitors. One of the main factors that cause longer loading time is excessive graphics. If this is the case, make your blog simple yet beautiful to speed up the loading time.
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Target the right keywords by using long-tail keyword phrase
One of the major reasons why people immediately leave the site is improper use of keywords that funnel non-targeted audience. Visitors will quickly hit the back button in their browsers if they don’t find anything valuable or interesting. To proper targeting of audience, use the appropriate keywords by avoiding short generic phrases; instead, go for long-tail keywords to precisely capture the right prospects.
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Create a powerful landing page
High bounce rate can be an indicator of a poor landing page. Test and tweak your sales copy and observe any improvement.
As you can see, bounce rates data is very useful in achieving online success through your blog. Make sure to use it to improve the overall performance of your website.
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