What Is Bounce...

Do you hear that?

That is the sound of your website rejecting potential customers.

Bounce… There goes another one.

You've probably seen the term 'bounce rate' before in your analytics reports, or heard someone mention it in conversation.

But do you really know what a bounce is?

Do you really understand the importance of this metric?

More importantly, do you know how to fix a high bounce rate?

Bounce Rate Defined

The Google Analytics Help Centre sums it up best with "Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page)".

Or, to put it more plainly, "Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors."

I have highlighted the key phrase in bold and if you only remember one thing, this is it.

What is a "high" bounce rate?

Everybody will have a different opinion on this, and of course there are variables such as seasonality and industry that come into play, but in general I feel that any page with a bounce rate higher than 25% needs attention.

25% still means one out of every four people who arrive at your website leave without looking further.

A retail store owner sure wouldn't be happy if one out of every four people who set foot in their store left without investigating different isles – it should be no different online.

How to Reduce a High Bounce Rate

There are a couple of things you can do to pages with high bounce rates, and in fact should be applied to all landing pages.

These two things should be simple to apply and believe me, if you do them well, you will notice a difference.

Relevancy

If I had to bet on one thing that was the cause of a page's high bounce rate, it would be a lack of relevancy.

Ensure your landing pages are relevant to your sites visitors. Landing pages are usually found via a search engine, so ensure your landing page talks specifically about the keyword the visitor used to find your website.

Call to Action

Any landing page must generate or maintain the visitors buying momentum through to a conversion goal such as a sale or an enquiry.

You must make it obvious to the visitor what you want them to do next by ensuring one primary call to action is prominently placed in the active window and above the fold.

Don't ask your visitors to make decisions. It is your job to guide them, you are in control.

Measure

After making changes to your landing pages, it is essential that you measure the effect those changes have.

Depending on your traffic volume, you may start seeing results in as little as a few days.

If you want to get really clever with your analysis, segment a page's bounce rate by traffic source to see how different sources of traffic react to landing on particular pages.