What is Bounce Rate?
There are many different elements and features of a website that can let you know whether your target audience is reacting well to the content you produce. It is important to know this information as it can help you to better understand what your audience is looking for and if your content is not being reacted well to, it gives you the opportunity to make some changes. One of the ways that you can know whether your website and the content on it is attracting customers is by looking at the bounce rate.
So what is a website bounce rate and how can it be analysed to provide you with information about a page? The bounce rate refers to the number of times a user visits a web page and does nothing on it before leaving. If you have a high bounce rate, this means that you have a lot of users visiting your page and then leaving immediately, and it is important that you find out why! A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing on certain pages as it may mean that people are following on to other pages on your website, so it is important to take this into consideration!
Why is Bounce Rate Important?
Bounce rate is important because it gives an indication of how users are interacting with a web page and whether or not there are elements that may need to be changed or updated. Monitoring the bounce rate can help you to better understand what pages your audience is finding useful and which pages are not interesting to them, allowing you to make changes as you receive this information. If you do not monitor the bounce rate, you will not have this vital information which can lead to fewer sales and traffic visiting certain web pages.
Another factor to consider is that while you may not monitor your bounce rate, search engines do and they may penalise you or lower your ranking should your bounce rate be high. To avoid this happening, you should always carefully review and monitor your bounce rate to ensure that your ranking is not lowered for this reason.
How to Calculate Bounce Rate?
A bounce rate can be measured by either bounce rate tools that will update as your sites get more visits, this automated system is recommended, or it can be done by using a manual formula. The formula works by dividing the number of sessions that only include one page by the total amount of visits to the site. Let us look at an example to better understand how this is done; if you get 200 visitors to your page in a day and 10 of them leave the page without triggering any further requests, your bounce rate would be 5%. Knowing this number and keeping track of which pages have a high bounce rate can help to ensure that you fix any issues that may be causing users to leave your website.
What Are Bounce Rate Averages by Site Type?
It is important to remember that having a high bounce rate is not always a bad thing and it depends on the content on a page and the type of website you have. A blog page for instance is designed for one-time visitors, they have a look at the content that you offer and then they will more than likely leave without visiting any other pages. A homepage is another example of a page that will have a high bounce rate, and this is to be expected. So at this point, you may be wondering “well, what is a good bounce rate?”. Though average bounce rates by industry do differ, it is suggested that having a bounce rate below around 20% is considered good, but if you have anything higher than 70%, you may want to have a look at the factors that could be encouraging users to leave a page.
What are the Reasons for a High Bounce Rate?
There are many reasons why you would have a high bounce rate on your website and it is important that you figure out what the reason is so you can make changes quickly. One of the main reasons to consider is the page speed, as slow page loading times often lead to a high bounce rate. There is nothing worse than clicking on a link that takes you to a page that is taking a long time to load, and many users will often give up after just a few seconds of waiting. It is important to remember that your page is often one of the thousands that a user can choose from, and if they cannot find information on your site, there are others just a click away.
What Can You Do To Improve Your Bounce Rate Metric On Your E-Commerce Site?
When looking at how to reduce bounce rate, the following may need to be taken into consideration.
Better User Experience
Many people may leave a webpage because certain elements are not working or are not what they were looking for. In order to improve your bounce rate, you may want to look into certain user experience features that may need to be optimised for your target market. User experience is extremely important, even more so now after Google’s last update! In order to improve the quality of your page and lower the number of people who leave your website without interacting with it, you can look at the experience that your users are having whilst on the page and optimise these features accordingly. One way to improve the user experience is to avoid having pop-ups appear on a page as this often disrupts the flow of the reader as they make look at the content on your page. Pop-ups can often seem spammy, so for a better user experience, it is best to avoid them!
Hearty and High-quality Content
Content is often one of the main reasons why users will leave a page without interacting with it. It is important that your content is perfectly aligned with your meta tags as this will give the user an idea of what to expect when they visit your page. Having high-quality information that is written with proper content planning done, while also being well-written will ensure that the users who visit your web page will be inclined to stay on it and read further into what you have to say. With an increase in the quality of the content comes the need to regularly update it. Users are able to see when last the page was updated, and if it was a while ago it may make them consider whether or not your content is relevant. If a long time has passed since the last update, a user may be inclined to go and find more recent data.
Avoiding Clickbait Methods
Many marketers and website designers use clickbait methods to attract customers to a page. While many assume that the increased traffic can help in terms of SEO, it is important to consider that search engines also take bounce rate into account when ranking certain pages. Clickbait methods attract and increase traffic, but it is often not considered to be good traffic, and this may impact the bounce rate and the quality of a website. Those who are attracted to a website are also not often customers who are going to make a purchase, meaning that using these kinds of methods are not going to get you an increase in revenue and sales!
A Faster Website
The speed of a website is one of the most important things to consider when it comes to reducing the bounce rate of a website. If a page is taking too long to load, users lose interest and will more often than not simply go back to the search engine and look for a website that will load faster. It is estimated that users will only wait around three seconds before leaving a page if it is not loading, so be sure that your page is loading in three seconds or less!
Creating Edits for Out-of-sale or Out-of-Stock Product Pages
If a user has come to a page that is out of stock of whatever was on offer, if you are not creating value on the page and offering the user something else that they may be interested in, you will more than likely lose them. Many people choose to put links to other items that are similar to the out-of-stock product to offer users the chance to purchase another item. While this may not work for every single user who visits your page, even if it just converts one visit into a sale, it would have been worth it!
