Bounce Rates. What’s The Deal?

Stop visitors from bouncing away from your content.

So, you have run a successful SEO campaign and your website is picking up traffic, but you’ve noticed that visitors to your site are not going beyond the page they have landed on and often leave right away. And you wonder, what’s the deal? Well, that’s what bounce rate is all about. Site visits not going beyond the initial page visited.

It is important to note that Google Analytics is your best tool when it comes to tracking the bounce rate of your website. It technically defines bounce rate as such:

“A bounce is a single-page session on your site. Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.”

Now, unless the only objective of your website is to provide information to its visitors then a high bounce rate is not entirely bad as visitors can leave as soon as they have read what they needed, but if your goal is to capture customers and you need them interacting with your website more, then you would definitely want a lower bounce rate. This is why it is important to understand why your visitors are leaving as soon as they got in to your website.

Here are a couple of reasons that drive a bounce rate up:

1. Your website might be taking forever to load.

A slow webpage will definitely push a visitor back to where they originally came from and might even push them to utilize another website that offers the same product or service where they can be accommodated better.

2. Incomplete website.

Links that are not working, pages that are under construction, and purposeless elements in a website all contribute to a bad user experience which will increase your websites bounce rate.

3. Confusing user interface.

There is a reason why investing in a good UI/UX developer is a great idea as they know how to make sure that your website is user friendly. And when your customers are comfortable, they’ll have no problems navigating through to your website.

4. Poorly designed website.

It’s not just about having a good interface but also about having a visually appealing or engaging website. A website should not just be easy to use but also easy on the eyes. And it is through a properly designed website can you really imprint a good brand to your potential customers.

5. Your website might not be optimized for mobile browsing.

Solely relying on a desktop friendly website nowadays is a bad idea. The current trend is to make sure that your website is navigable for mobile users as people tend to use this more than their desktop computers when they want to search for a product or a service.