What Is Bounce Rate & How To Improve It?

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric, which shows how many people visit one page and leave the website. It’s calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the total number of sessions. For example, if you have 1000 visitors to your website in a day and 100 of them visited only 1 page then a 100% Bounce Rate would result.

Visitors who leave immediately after hitting the home page are called quick bounces, while visitors who leave after clicking on a link or other section of the website, but leave before taking any other action, are called slow bounces.

What Bounce Rate Determines

Bounce rate is a metric that determines whether your visitors are interested in the content of your website or not. Bounce rate helps you identify if your visitors want to learn more about what’s on your website or they just had a quick glance and were ready to leave. Bounce rate is a good indicator for lead generation and overall, assessing your business leads.

What Bounce Rate Doesn’t Determine

Bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean that you have bad content on your website; It only shows the number of visitors who came to your website, looked around for a few seconds and then left without exploring any other content. Bounce rate is not an indicator that people are not interested in your business or product but it could mean that content on your website or blog could be improved.

How to Tell if your Bounce Rate is Good or Bad?

Bounce rates less than 50% are considered good, while rates above 90% would indicate that something needs to be done immediately in order to improve the overall performance of your website.

If the majority of people who visit your website stay for more than 10 seconds, then it is likely that the bounce rate is good. However, if people are leaving your website almost immediately after arriving, this means that you need to work on improving the time spent on site. Bounce rates outside of this range are often indicative of what aspects visitors do not like about your content or site in general.

What Affects Bounce Rate?

There are many factors that affect bounce rate, let’s look at some of the most common ones:

• Number of pages - Bounce rate is directly linked to how many pages on your website were visited before leaving without exploring any other content. The more pages visitors visit, the higher the bounce rate is. In this case, increasing the number of pages or blog posts could be a solution as well as improving what is on those pages so that your visitors don’t want to leave so fast.

• Average time spent on a website - If bounce rate is high and visitors are leaving after a few seconds or minutes, then it could mean that they came to your website for the content that you provide but didn’t find what they were looking for.

• Device used - Bounce rate is much higher on mobile devices than on computers because people usually come to the website only to browse quickly and leave without exploring any other content.

• Time of day - Bounce rate varies depending on the time of day that users arrive. People are more likely to stay at their computers during work hours than they are during evenings or weekends, so you would expect bounce rates to be lower during typical non-working hours.

How to Improve Bounce Rate?

There are several different ways to improve bounce rate and overall make your website more engaging and interactive. Here is a selection of suggestions to help improve the bounce rate for your website:

• The best way to improve bounce rate would be to track the time spent on each page, then check which pages had more than one click. Bounce rate could be improved by ensuring that all website content is relevant to the user’s interest and their original search.

• Improve the content of your website so that people stay on it for at least 30 seconds. Provide them with sufficient information about what you’re offering to get the attention they deserve.

• Make sure your website is simple and easy to navigate.

• Make sure your website loads fast and is free from errors. There are some great websites where you can enter your URL and find out how quick (or not so quick) your page loads.

• Add a blog, which will expand the content of your website and give visitors more reasons to stay on it for a longer time period.

• Try using different forms of social media marketing tactics such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. to get more people to come to your website.

• Use web analytics software to get a better understanding of bounce rate and ways you can improve it.

It’s always good to know what bounce rate is and how it affects the performance of your marketing campaigns. Bounce rate can be improved by creating high-quality and engaging content that will keep visitors on your website for a longer period of time.

Conclusion

Understanding your bounce rate is an important step in making sure that you know how to improve it. The lower the number, the better! The good news is that there are ways you can lower your bounce rates like making sure you have relevant and engaging content and also creating an easy-to-navigate homepage design. Get in touch today so we can find out what our team of experts can do for you when it comes to improving your website’s bounce rates.