For anyone doing business through the web, there is one important metric that needs to be closely analyzed. When thinking about web design and how you want to optimize your site to increase business potential, your website’s bounce rate can tell you if you’re currently doing this correctly. The bounce rate is a metric that gives you the quality of traffic to your website. If your bounce rate is high, it means that customers either found your website irrelevant to their query, or that they didn’t find the site engaging. Either way, it means you’re not converting enough of the traffic to true potential customers.
What is Bounce Rate?
There are two ways to define this metric. The first way tells you how many visitors who came to your site through any page, left without visiting any other page. While many sites may find that this number is a sufficient indicator of bounce rate, there are many more that need a better way to calculate this metric.
For example, a visitor might come to one of your product pages, reads the whole page and finds one of the products interesting. He remembers your company and product name, and comes back at a later date to search for the product through a search engine. So, even though he only visited one page on your website, it doesn’t mean he didn’t find what he was looking for. Similarly, if a customer finds everything he needs to take action on one page, like product or service description and contact information, then he will probably stop there and just call the number displayed.
In such cases, a better way to determine bounce rate would be to set up an event trigger based on time spent on the landing page. If the visitor doesn’t close or navigate away from your website within an amount of time specified by you, then that visitor doesn’t count as a bounce.
Using Google Analytics to Find Your Bounce Rate
So, how do you find your website’s bounce rate? If you’ve set up an account in Google Analytics and linked your website to it, you’ll have access to some valuable metrics, one of which is the bounce rate. You can find this value when you go to the “Site Usage” part of your Analytics dashboard. You can also check the bounce rate for all traffic sources, like referral links, search engines, article directories, etc. Another useful report shows you bounce rates of each of your website’s pages.
If you want your bounce rate to be adjusted to exclude single-page visits that are not too short, Google provides you with a snippet of code to add to your pages. This code sets off an event trigger when a visitor is on your page for a specified amount of time. If the trigger goes off, then the visit is not counted as a bounce. You can find this code in the Google Analytics blog.
What is an Average Bounce Rate?
While Google reports that the average bounce rate for all websites is 40%, this number is not really useful because the averages can vary depending on industry type. While content and lead generation websites average between 30% and 60%, blogs and landing pages have high bounce rates, averaging between 70% and 90%. Portals, retail sites and service sites have low bounce rates, averaging from 10% to 30%.
Reasons Users Bounce and How You Can Fix it
1.They see too many ads
Too many ads, use of pop-up ads and bad placement of ads are all factors that cause people to quickly leave your site. They prevent visitors from being able to access relevant content easily. Surveys, streaming videos or music can also negatively affect the bounce rate. Keep all of these to a minimum and only use them if they are relevant to page content.
2. Irrelevant pages visited from search engines
If your pages rank for irrelevant keywords through search engines, then visitors will leave as soon as they see that your information is not what they were looking for. Instead, provide relevant information and use keywords that naturally relate to the subject.
3. Pages Take Too Long to Load
While many novice webmasters like to create complex and flashy websites, many elements that they add, like plugins and third-party tools can cause the page to load very slowly. Keep third-party content and widgets to a minimum and either use lazy-loading via AJAX or Google’s Page Speed plugin.
4. External Links
While providing useful resource links that visitors can use to find more information may seem like a good practice, it means that you’re leading the user away from your website. Keep external links to a minimum and only if you can’t provide the information in your own website.
5. Confusing website design
If the website doesn’t have a clear navigational system, a user can’t find relevant information. Make sure every page of your website has a clear navigation menu and provide a search function as well.
6. Confusing Site Purpose
Whenever visitors come to a landing page, it should be immediately clear to them what kind of service or product you are offering. The design and content should reflect that. Highlight important information and features by using headlines and graphics.
By paying attention to your bounce rate and optimizing your website to lower it, you’ll find that you’ll get better quality traffic, with more repeat visitors and more visitors actually being interested in your business.
0 comments:
Post a Comment