Bounce Rate – this is a metric that all marketers, SEO specialists, and website owners strive to improve. In Google Analytics, a bounce is a session in which the user sends only one request to the system, and after that, no further activity. In other words, a user opens a page of the site and immediately closes it. This index is calculated by the ratio of refusals to the total number of visits to the site. This is this calculation:
750/1000 = 0.75 = 75%; Bounce rate = Bounces / Total Visitors x 100%
Website Bounce Rate. About
A site visit session with 100% return is always defined as 0 (zero) seconds. This is due to the nature of Google Analytics. But you can configure Google Analytics so that a session lasting longer than 15 seconds with no other transitions is not considered a failure. To do this, you need to add a snippet in the middle of the code before the closing script tag, as follows:
setTimeout ("ga ('send', 'event', 'read', '15_seconds')", 15000);A high bounce rate scares marketers, but it is not always a problem for website promotion and development.
It all depends on the objectives and goals of this website. For a single site or this blog, having a user only viewing one page automatically considered a denial is normal.
If there are links on the site page and the goal of the web portal is to attract customers, the bounce rate should be low. The acceptable bounce rates for different landing pages look like this:
- main – 40%
- category – up to 50%
- goods – up to 70%
- article – up to 70%
If the bounce rate on the company’s website is higher than these values, it is still possible to fix the situation.
There are several ways to reduce this rate. Before concluding, it is necessary to analyze the data on pages with a high bounce rate in more detail. Failures should be segmented by:
- traffic channels
- PC and adaptive version
- incoming pages
The other results will depend on this fragmentation.
Lowering Bounce Rate: Tips That Work
Upon visiting a single page, users leave it. The situation harms not only the site’s statistics but also the owner’s estimated revenue. Often, the reasons why visitors refuse to continue their journey through the web portal are clear; but there are times when there is no apparent reason for this.
To analyze user behavior and quickly respond to an increase in bounces, we recommend using Plerdy tools. By adding the Plerdy tracking code, the marketer will be able to study the visitor’s actions. Plerdy’s heatmap will help you build hypotheses about the causes of the problem.
The owner of a corporate website or online store wants to minimize the bounce rate as much as possible. There are dozens of methods to achieve this goal, but not all can bring the desired results.
Here is a list of effective methods to deal with high bounce rates.
Improve user experience
User experience (UX) is a common cause of high bounce rates on a website. User experience is a collection of thoughts, emotions, and impressions that a potential client experiences.
The success of an advertising campaign, the number of orders, micro and macro conversions may depend on this indicator.
UX designers should consider what might be turning off customers to the site. Among the reasons for refusals are:
- color palettes in which the menu font is indistinguishable from background color;
- congested design of the main page;
- too complicated navigation;
- slow loading;
- consistency and intuitiveness of site navigation.
If the site’s structure is not optimized, the user may refuse to work with such a web resource.
To correct the situation, the marketer should:
- determine which pages have a high bounce rate;
- perform an in-depth analysis of site pages based on the click map and recordings of video sessions;
- set tasks for the designer and front-end specialist.
If the bounce rate has decreased, it is necessary to segment all data by traffic channels. After the site transformation, the bounce rate should drop by a few percent.
Optimizing pages and call to action
The opinion of a potential client is formed within the first seconds. The first screen of the landing page allows the client to understand what emotions the site evokes quickly. How interested is the client in spending time on it?
Optimizing the non-scrollable part of the page can help marketers increase the chances of further clicks to another page, action, or filter. – but it needs to be styled in addition to the explicit call to action on the landing page. Do not overload the page with a lot of links to other sections of the site.
Having found the middle ground between informativeness and attracting attention, the site owner reduced the bounce rate.
Conducting A/B Testing
The purpose of A/B tests, in this case, is to test how well the call to action posted on the landing pages of the site is performing. If the quality of this call and its effectiveness are too low, this will affect the page’s productivity. Therefore, to reduce the bounce rate on pages with a high percentage of this index, marketers conduct A/B testing. Please note that for effective testing, the site must receive more than 1000 visits per week. Otherwise, the available data will not be sufficient for analysis.
Success stories as a tool
some sites use reviews as a promotion tool. Feedback works quite effectively and causes an increase in customer loyalty. However, this method can be improved by making it more interesting – add photos, video, or audio materials instead of a text quote.
Users love success stories. If the company shows that cooperation with it is effective, the number of orders will increase. At the same time, the bounce rate will begin to decline.
Each of these methods is extremely useful in working to reduce bounce rates. Using a few tips can increase their overall impact. If all edits are made correctly, the failure rate can be reduced from 10 to 5%. Of course, it depends on the topic of the site and the type of web page. Keep in mind that the bounce rate will never go down to 0.
Bounce Rate vs. Drop Off
Despite popular belief, bounce rate and exit rate are different concepts.
Google Analytics data task is to illustrate by numerical correspondence the number of site visitors who left the site after visiting only one page.
At the same time, exit rate is the data that helps the site analyst understand which page was the last one visited. The indicator makes it possible to determine why the client did not continue their conversion path and why the offer did not interest them.
These terms are often confused with each other. But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that both of them are incredibly important to the site’s success. By distinguishing between these concepts, the analyst of the web page has the opportunity to react to the situation and make exactly the needed changes. Furthermore, the correct interpretation of the indicators determines the understanding of the problem and accelerates its correction.
Importance of Bounce Rate
If the bounce rate is too high, the site owner should seriously try to understand the reason. But what does the bounce rate affect? Let’s figure it out.
Many bounces may indicate inaccurate information or a poor-quality call to action. A high bounce rate on a company’s web resource brings certain problems.
If a user’s session duration is negligible, the site owner should consider updating and reorganizing. Often, adding new content, optimizing a page, and increasing its loading speed will pay off.
If the bounce rate has not changed after the upgrade, then the reason lies elsewhere. Usability experts should find UX errors.
Bounce Rate and SEO. Need to know
SEO is the primary marketing channel that brings traffic from the Google search engine to sites worldwide. The bounce rate is the first signal that something is wrong on the site. But is it always the case?
Google pays much less attention to this indicator than it might seem at first glance.
Matt Cutts – “Google’s former head of Webspam has denied Google’s use of bounce rates in ranking algorithms.”
But considering that:
- Core Web Vitals are the speed metrics of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. The metrics measure visual load with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID).
- Page experience and the included Core Web Vital metrics will officially be used for ranking pages in June 2021.
It can be assumed that the bounce rate takes part in site evaluation as part of the search algorithm. But this theory has several weaknesses.
So, the website’s failures are relative – a high bounce rate can depend on many factors. This statement applies to Google’s Chrome browser.
Lowering the bounce rate
Bounce rate is one of the parameters that almost all marketers, SEO/PPC specialists, and website or online store owners strive to improve. Although this rate doesn’t always mean that visitors decided not to contact a manager or support (especially if there is a chat or contact number on the page), it is still a problem for some pages. Sometimes a bounce rate can be as high as over 50%.
If this sounds familiar to you, we have a solution. The Plerdy team wants to demonstrate how popup forms can lower a bounce rate based on two websites. Using the results of our research and analysis, we have completed these case studies.
Case.Lowering the bounce rate on Lemarbet’s website
The first case is based on the use of popup forms by our partners, the website of Lemarbet online agency. The research data covers 13 days (June 07-June 20, 2021).
It was a great time to do some analysis since the website was offering the registration for a webinar. All visitors who stayed on the page for over 10 seconds saw the following banner:
In Plerdy dashboard, the chart of interaction with forms showed the ratio of impressions to closing and sending:
If to take a larger time (March 2 -July 25), you easily notice the period when the bounce rate was decreasing. The overall bounce rate for a nearly month worked out 41.86%:
Compared to the similar previous period, the bounce rate reduced by 14.86%.
Since there were no additional activities or changes on the website. During that period, we could find out that the bounce rate lowered thanks to solely popup forms.
Conclusions
Bounce rate is a relative value that can alert marketers of a problem on a web page. Tracking this index can warn a company of difficulties that could affect the ranking in the future. The increase in bounce rates has an impact on other aspects, including the number of conversions. By tracking the bounce rate on the site, the owner can find errors, quickly make changes and avoid further delays in the promotion. Working on the factors that drive bounce rates is good for customer loyalty and user experience. These parameters can play a key role in a website’s success.
