Analyze and Improve the Bounce Rate of Your Site

Bounce rate, which is an indirect measure of user’s engagement, need to be analyzed thoroughly rather than just looking at the final value. Bounce rate can be calculated from site level and individual page level.

Individual Page Level: Bounce rate is the ratio of visitors who enter the site from that page and leave without going any deeper, to the total number of visitors who enter the site through that page. Basically, it is single page visits / total entries to the site through that page.

Site Level: Bounce rate is calculated as single page visits / total site visits. The question typically asked is what is the industry standard of bounce rate? It would depends on the site, industry, the mix of media and campaign that is running, how that landing page is served, etc.

According to a survey studies, following are the min and max of the bounce rate for certain categories.

• eCommerce: Min 14.3%; Max 68.0%
• Product Information: Min 3.2%; Max 50.0%
• Lead Generation: Min 5.2%; Max 81.0%
• News/Media: Min 25.0%; 81.4%
• Branding: Min 22.0%; Max 70.1%
• Other: Min 13.0%; Max 85.0%

Interpreting the Bounce Rate

A high Bounce Rate may indicate that the website needs a new direction. A low Bounce rate does not guarantee success. If the conversion rate is low, then you may need to review the type of visitor that is currently being attracted to your website. If the second definition of the “Bounce Rate” is used, the number of returning visitors may be a more meaningful statistic to judge the quality of traffic:

• websites that comprise just a single page can have a high Bounce Rate.
• websites that supply information on a single page, like a Wiki, can have a high Bounce Rate.
• Blogging websites usually have a high Bounce Rate.

There is no average Bounce Rate that can be called good or bad. An acceptable Bounce Rate depends very much upon the type of the website, the target audience and expectations. The only real criterion is the conversion rate – i.e. the number of new customers derived each month from the website. If the conversion rate is not acceptable, then the Bounce Rate, whatever it is, needs to be reduced.

Improving the bounce rate

Depending on what the analytics offered you here are some things to do, in order to improve the bounce rate:

1.If the average time is high enough for you then you need to decide if you want to determine people to also visit other pages of your website. Maybe your ordering page has a high bounce rate but decent average time and you don’t want people to navigate further. But if you do, think about some links that you could place in your content and that point to other articles on your blog that are related.

2.If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by keywords here are some things to do:

• If you can incorporate new information in the article that is relevant to a keyword is ok
• If you consider that you already have decent information then check how is presented. Try making the words bold, or italic, or change the colors. If the article is more than 500 words use subtitles to break the content and let people know what each section talks about. The idea is that if someone is interested only in some of your information then he should be able to easily find it, without having to read the entire article
• If you can’t incorporate new information, consider writing some new content and place links to the additional articles

3.If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by the source then you may consider other channels for marketing your content.

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