What is Bounce Rate?
What is bounce rate?
Simply put, your bounce rate is the number of people leaving your website after viewing just one page. This matters because the lower your bounce rate is, the higher your site will rank in Google searches.
What's your bounce rate?
You can find out what your bounce rate percentage is by using Google Analytics. If you don't have that set up yet, check out this guide on how to get started!
Are high bounce rates always bad?
While bounce rates typically have a negative connotation associated with them, it is important to consider the goal of your site. If your site is designed so that you want the viewer to click through the site or perform an action, then you will want to have a lower bounce rate. However, if you have a one-page site and all the information the viewer would need is presented on that page, then you don’t need to be as concerned with bounce rate because you know that your viewers are still getting what they came for.
What are average bounce rates?
A typical rule of thumb is that websites with a bounce rate in the range of 25% to 40% are considered excellent. Anything over 70% could use improvement. Where anything less than 20% or higher than 90% can sometimes mean that there could be an issue with the analytics setup.
Why are viewers bouncing off your site?
It takes too long to load. The average time that a viewer will wait for a site to load is 4 seconds. If it is taking longer than that, most likely you have lost them before you've even had the chance to gain their attention. Check out your site's load speed using this free tool by GTmetrix.
Your design is distracting. Pay attention to your font choices, colors and the size of your text. While some fonts are great choices for headings, they might not be the right choice for body text. The same goes for the size of your text throughout your site. Make sure that the colors of your text are also easy to read.
Your navigation is confusing. Make sure it is very clear to your viewers where to find the information they are looking for.
Your Pop-Ups are too aggressive. While a strategic Pop-Up can be beneficial (after your viewer has had a chance to learn about what you are offering) too many or too soon can be a huge turn off for viewers! Also, if you do have Pop-Ups, make sure that the "X" button is easy to find and not too discreet. A lot of viewers can become frustrated by this and just leave your site in general instead of taking the time to close the Pop-Up.
How can you improve your bounce rate?
Consider making your call-to-actions more obvious and make sure that your site is clearly providing the information your viewers came for.
Create a landing page where your viewer can find the information they are in search of. For example, if you are mentioning a course, blog post or specific information on your Instagram and linking to it in your bio, create a landing page that viewers will see as soon as they hit your site, so you don’t lose their attention.
Make your call-to-action clearly displayed on your landing pages. Also, be aware that your landing pages need to load quickly and be visually appealing or users can get easily frustrated and navigate away.
To improve your site's load time, run your images through TinyJPG, a free JPEG and PNG compressor. It will reduce the file size without compromising the quality.
In Conclusion:
Bounce rates usually have a negative connotation associated with them and while you should be aware of what your bounce rate is and making an effort to decrease it, you should also pay attention to what the goal of your site actually is. It is important to remember that what bounce rate ranges will vary from site to site. You should set your own baseline for what your bounce rate range should be and work to improve the areas where needed.