What does it mean? What is a reasonable bounce rate? Why is bounce rate important? What can you do to reduce your bounce rate?
Website Realities
Beginning any business activity with perfect success rate is rare, and it is the same for websites too. Most web presence initiatives start tentatively and get better with time.
Using web analytics intelligently help in improving your website's overall performance against predefined web metrics. Web analytic tools like Google analytics basically provide statistics on web visitor behaviour. These numbers truthfully tell site-managers all that is happening on their website i.e. number of visitors, pages visited, average time spent on each web page and actions done on different web-pages. Web-analytics is thus critical to managing your website because you can only improve an activity which you can track and understand. As your website is one of the most important means of promoting your business and keeping customers hooked to your business proposition, leveraging Google analytics effectively; is key to sustaining your competitive edge.
Bounce Rate in Google Analytics Web surfers are usually focused searchers on the Internet and they generally go directly to a website because it has something they want. More visitors can come from the different forms of searches i.e. search engines, web directories. When a visitor first arrives on a website they quickly scan the webpage to see if it provides what they seek, they then become your scanning visitors. Once they like what they see, they commit to reading your web pages and thus become committed visitors. Generally webmasters consider committed visitors to be those who read more than one web page or spend more than one minute on a single page. However, this could differ as per individual web page layouts or content complexity. Understanding the behaviour of both the scanning and committed visitors helps you to analyse consumer behaviour accurately and how different people interact with different site elements. Bounce rate is that percentage of visitors who simply scan the website and leave it within 30 seconds. Some webmasters consider bounce rate to be the percentage of web visitors who simply look at the homepage and do not click on any other webpage. Bounce rate is thus a measure to gauge the 'stickiness' of your website content. The lower the bounce rate the better it is and anything less than 50% is considered reasonable, though this will differ according to brand maturity of your organization, the
search engine optimisation efforts of your web site and any other offline/online promotional activities you maybe conducting to drive more traffic to your website.
Reducing Bounce Rates
Getting visitors to start spending more time on your webpages instead of scanning requires a well researched interplay between different design and content elements. You have to seriously pitch your business "unique selling proposition" (USP) to your target audience in a manner that appeals to your web visitors, thereby compelling them to interact more with your webpage and also do some serious reading. Ideally your designers should design pages that appeal to both new as well as old visitors (keep adding new elements keeping overall branding and visual appeal intact) in order to persuade visitors to switch from scanning to reading more often. Content on the web-pages should successfully funnel web-visitors into relevant pages inside your web-site which need to be designed in a manner that the visitors commit to desired action (filling up a form, purchasing or even playing a contest). These 'desired action' oriented web pages are often called landing pages which act as effective sales pitch web pages too. Successful sites usually have different landing pages for each online activity that is planned.
If your business would like expert help in reviewing the current performance of your website and the development of strategies to generate more business from the Internet, make sure you talk to our friendly team of web analytics experts at ROI.com.au
