Whenever we look at analytics on a website, the bounce rate is always one we analyse – one we always include and remember to look at. This little statistic can tell us so much about the website, or the landing page, and what we want to do, is get the percentage value as low as possible.

What is a bounce rate?

This is the percentage of visitors on your website that leave your website without looking at a second page. Think of a bouncy wall hitting a wall and bouncing off straight away without rolling anywhere else – bounce rate. Within Google Analytics, you can see the bounce rate per page, which is especially useful if you want to see how well an advert or campaign is going. You can also see the bounce rate per acquisition – is the rate higher for people coming from social media, or referrals?

The data tells us a lot. For example, let’s say your bounce rate from social media to your home page is quite high (anything over 50%) – this might suggest that your social media profile doesn’t quite reflect what your visitors expect when they land on your homepage. Perhaps the bounce rate from organic search is much lower, meaning they are happier with what they find when they’ve searched, and come across your website.

What is a good bounce rate?

Think about how many times you do go to a website and only look at that one page before going back? It’s probably a lot isn’t it, which is why you can get ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bounce rates.

Generally, anything lower than 50% is a great bounce rate in our opinion. 50% might seem quite high, but it’s basically a natural way of browsing around the internet, not exploring further than one page, so 50% is great!

  • 80%+ is very bad
  • 70-80% is poor
  • 50-70% is average (and most of your pages will probably be this)
  • 30-50% is excellent
  • >30% is exceptional, and might actually be an error!

Tips to improve your bounce rate

  1. Always keep the user in mind – user experience (UX) is important and will encourage any visitors to explore your website further. User experience covers things like how easy your website is to navigate and understand, how it looks.
  2. Optimise your website – make sure your website loads quickly, first impressions make a huge difference to visitors going further to explore your content. We usually recommend Pingdom or Google Site Speed as a way to test your site, but do it perhaps 4 times in a day, and take an average.
  3. Diversify your content – we don’t all like to read, infact, attention spans are much shorter now than they used to be. By adding new and different content you can hopefully capture your audience – high quality images, embedding videos – all to engage that attention.
  4. Do some testing – often called A/B testing, you could test the content or call to actions on your website to see what works well, and what doesn’t. You can take this a step further too and create specific landing pages for any campaigns and adverts online, tweaking as your test to see what works and how this affects your bounce rate.
  5. Work on your content – two strands here, making sure your content is readable, and making sure your content is interesting for your audience. So, first you will need a good content strategy, and secondly you will need to make sure you write in a way that is easy to read. Easy to read? The font, size of the colour, its colour and also it’s ‘readability’ in terms of structure, grammar and so on. You can install plugins like Yoast on WordPress websites, which will look at this readability for you.
  6. Target users who are about to leave – A final top tip from us, you can target visitors of your website who are about to leave or who have clicked the ‘x’ button – perhaps they’re only leaving because they’re busy or something cropped up. There’s technology out there that will track when a visitor is about to leave your website, and you can then sent them a message at that moment. The most common would be a pop up to a mailing list.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’ll find that there are quite a few tips here on how you can reduce your bounce rate, we think the most important is being aware of it and knowing that you can work on your search engine optimisation to reduce it.

  • Always keep the user in mind
  • Optimise your website
  • Diversify your content
  • Do some testing
  • Work on your content
  • Target users who are about to leave