Internet Bounce Rate – Is It Important For Your Website?

There are various statistics that are used to determine the response of visitors to a website. One of the most important ones is the Internet Bounce Rate.

The Internet bounce rate is the volume of visitors who leave your site after visiting just one page. It is calculated as a percentage.

There are various ways of ‘bouncing’. They are listed below:

• Clicking on another website that you may have linked on your page.
• Going back to the previous website they were browsing by using the ‘back’ button
• Going to another website by typing in the address of a new website in the address bar of their browser
• Closing the related tab or exiting the browser.

The bounce rate is different depending on the type of website you have. Your bounce rate tells you whether your visitors are actually getting what they expect when they click on the URL of your website. Tools like Google Analytics help you know this rate.

A low bounce rate means that you are doing it right. Visitors come to your website, find what they see within reasonable expectations and stay to browse other pages or posts.

This means that your visitors have a high chance of ‘converting’. Converting means they will actually use your website for buying a product, or subscribing and registering with you.

A high bounce rate, on the other hand, means that visitors are leaving your website almost immediately without going on to other pages or posts. This means that they are not getting the information they wanted or expected.

So what are the factors that might lead to a high bounce rate?

1. Pop-up advertisements. If a visitor comes to your website and is immediately besieged by ‘Computer usage surveys’ or ‘Get slim in 7 days’ advertisements then there is a high chance that the visitor might simply get annoyed and leave.

2. Distracting advertisements. There are advertisements on almost every website, but make sure the advertisements are not interfering with relaying the content you are trying to provide the visitor.

3. Streaming music. If your website plays music as soon as a visitor opens it, often the result is that the visitor will immediately close that tab. This is especially true when someone is accessing your website at work or in school.

4. Auto-starting video. Similar to streaming music, this can also be embarrassing or annoying. This is worse if the mechanism to pause or stop the video is not in immediate view.

5. Confusion. If the navigation or information on your page is given in too confusing a format, there is a high chance that the visitor will leave your site. Avoid clutter.

6. Irrelevant content. Any irrelevant content will make the visitor leave. This mismatch may happen due to the incorrect usage of anchor text by a website that has linked to you or if there is a mismatch between your domain name and content.

7. External links. If your site provides links to other websites, then it is obvious that your bounce rate is pretty high. This happens in the case of portals.

8. Incorrect text in search engines. If a visitor comes to your site by Google searching ‘buy home estates in America’ and instead finds a post about celebrity mansions, then they will immediately leave. Edit tag and meta-description files to make sure your website appears as you want it to in search engines.

9. Load time. This is a no-brainer. If your website takes too long to load, visitors will leave. Make sure that if you do have a page that takes longer to load, it is not the homepage.

10. Inappropriate content. Make sure your content is appropriate, useful, and interesting for your target audience.

11. Few links to other pages. The surest way to accelerate your bounce rate is to provide no links to other pages. Make sure your present page leads the visitor to another one.

12. Page not found. 404 Page not found is one of the most annoying words to see on your screen. Make sure your error page has the capability of leading the visitor to what they were looking for.

Google Analytics bounce rate

One of the best free tools Google offers Internet marketers is Google Analytics. Using this service can really help you identify and deal with your Internet bounce rate. It is free to install and something you should be using if you are not.

How can it help improve the bounce rate of websites?

In my opinion, the most important thing you will learn is how to improve the quality of your web pages. Google Analytics will show you where people are entering your website, i.e. what page are they coming to.

As your website or blog grows it is natural for people to start finding you on pages outside of your home page. As a matter of fact, you want this to happen.

Once they land on your site what are they doing? This is what Google Analytics will tell you.

If they are staying on one page long then other chances are very good you have quality content on that page. Analyze it and see what you can do to improve pages where people land and leave almost immediately.

Make improvements to pages you felt people should be staying on longer. Watch your analytics to see if these changes are helping.

Final thoughts

Let me close this article by saying there is no one ideal bounce rate. It is different for different sites. Work at keeping your overall bounce rate around 20% and you can feel confident you have quality relevant content people are looking for and finding on your site.

If you have a call-to-action early on your post or page, so bounce rate would not be bad in that case. Simply because of directing your audience to your offer or landing page before they read your entire post. This I see a lot of the internet gurus are adapting to and working for them.

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