Fix My Bounce Rate!

I wrote last week about bounce rates, after several discussions with many people over the last few weeks who have been concerned about their bounce rate. As you’ll have seen in my previous article, I’d caution against concentrating solely on this figure – because it fluctuates often depending on the type of website, page and source of traffic.

So when asked by clients how do I fix my bounce rate, I always go back to these things first. I’d encourage you to re-read my article and take caution on focusing on this one metric. Context is everything!

However, I also know people do want practical measures to fix their bounce rate. If you have analysed (or had others analyse) your website, and still think there is a problem with your bounce rate, here are some things that can help reduce a high bounce rate.

Optimise your page/website.

This is most important aspect if you want to reduce your bounce rate. Make sure it is well laid out, the design is eye catching and intuitive and there is a strong call to action. Put your contact details on your landing pages, and give key navigation areas (where relevant) to show readers where they can get more information. This advice is very important, especially if you are running paid campaigns to drive traffic to your landing pages. These are your shop windows and need to be optimised accordingly.

Go back to basics – what is your page loading speed? Is your site optimised for mobile? If your page takes too long to load, especially on mobile, then this will mean you will have a high bounce rate.

Make your content engaging.

Remember Google’s definition of a bounce? It’s when someone goes on one page of your website, doesn’t interact with it, and then leaves. So give them a reason to look around!

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog, try and give your reader some linked information. You’ll see on our blog, we have ‘related articles’ that show you other articles we have written on the same subject, in the case under our ‘SEO’ category. We also internally link to other articles, where relevant, to encourage you to gain as much info as you need.

Make your articles easy to read. Short paragraphs, short sentences, with relevant headings, is a great way to write to allow your readers to skim for the information most important to them. Newspapers have been using this technique for decades!

If you have an e-commerce website, put related/similar products on your product pages, potentially with add-on purchases. This is the digital method of the point-of-sale stalls at checkouts that are so prevalent in our shops.

Is it possible to have too low bounce rates?

Most of the above have talked about reducing your bounce rate. So does this mean that the lower the better? For a lot of cases, the answer is yes. But it is possible to have too low a rate as well.

The most common reason why your bounce rate could be low is that your Google Analytics code has been duplicated, especially in Open Source platforms. This is a quick fix, so should be your first point of call.

The purpose of most pages on most sites will be to interact with you at some stage. You might have videos to watch, downloads you want your visitors to read, or areas where people can send you contact details to gain information.

Ensure your analytics are set up to monitor these events on the page, which in turn monitors the behaviour of your site visitor as a whole. Measure this with your ‘Time on Site’ statistic (which in itself is an estimate). If your time on site, or dwell time, is high, then your visitor could be getting on they need. If not, look at some of the other areas we’ve spoken about above.

Conclusion

There are ways in which you can make your site more appealing, to encourage people to stay and look around. Try implementing some of these tips, or call us if you need some help with these areas.

One thing I wanted to reiterate is monitor these changes, and how the impact the performance of a website as a whole. If the changes you make result in a lower bounce rate, but also lower conversions/lower revenue, this defeats the point. Metrics from each website shouldn’t been read in isolation, and the outcomes are the most important aspect.