Many are confused about what this means and often think of a page bounce as a page exit. Here's a quick explanation. 60% bounce rate means that 60% of your visitors left your website from the home (or landing) page. The other 40% clicked on at least one link and explored the site more.
How high is too high?
Not many of us are lucky enough to enjoy below 30% bounce rate, but anything over 60% is worrisome. There are exceptions to this rule. A flash intro page with a single link to enter a site may have a very low bounce rate, but it has very little content value. A site where a visitor only needs to see a home (landing) page to complete their search, e.g., a local plumbing company website where a phone number is displayed on the home page can have a very high bounce rate.
Why is it important?
The most important reason for the site to have a low bounce rate is to retain the visitors by capturing their attention and inviting them to explore the site more. In addition to that, high bounce rate may affect your search engine ranking position. There’s no official information on this, but most webmasters and SEO specialists believe that the search engines may lower your ranking for some specific terms if that terms receives a high bounce rate. It could be (and logically speaking should be) considered a metric of page relevancy used in search engine algorithms.
What can be done to lower bounce rate?
Relevant content on the home page. Users searching for services or products may land on your website and not see what they were looking for. In some cases it's just a blind word match you can do nothing about. For example, our website gets visitors searching for Great Point lighthouse who leave our site after seeing the home page. Clearly, their search has very little to do with the services Great Point Designs has to offer. However, most of the time users leave because the information they were hoping to see is not there or hidden on another page without a noticeable link to it.
Pop-up windows and embedded overlays. In order to increase the conversion rate site owners often use pop-up and lightbox-like content on the home pages. Personally, I don’t like these techniques. They distract me from seeing what I’m looking for. I typically leave these sites unless the information I'm looking for cannot be found anywhere else. Well, I don't leave Yahoo! because of occasional ad moving across the screen, but they are Yahoo! – I've been using their free email for over 10 years.
Links to other sites. If a landing page contains many links to other sites it may increase your bounce rate simply because your site users may find such links interesting and click on them. Even if the links open a new window, it is still considered a bounce. Clicking on ads (which could be your ultimate goal) are also bounces. If you feel your bounce rate is so high it's hurting your rankings, you may want to keep your home and other landing pages ad free.
Broken links and under construction pages. Check your site for any broken links. You never know what might be broken or outdated. "Under Construction" and "The Page is Coming Soon" pages are fine when your site is brand new and you just need something up there for a week while you are catching up. But if they "sit" there for months, it just makes your website look unattended to both search engines and visitors.
As always, if you have any questions about seo or web design, we will be happy to answer them for you.
7 Response to Bounce Rate: What Does It Mean and How to Reduce It?
If you link to other pages on your site from the landing page, but those pages are just small popups does clicking these links eliminate the "bounce?"
As long as those pop-ups are the part of your website (same domain), clicking on them would not be considered a bounce.
When you say it is not considered a bounce, do you mean the visit is still in limbo and could still become a bounce if, for example, the first tab is closed?
Or does the click to the new tab/window count as a tracking event, making the visit a non-bounce?
When the users come to your site, (1) do they click on a link for a pop-up to appear? Or (2) does a pop-up just pops-up on its own as the site loads?
If they click, this is no longer a bounce because they visited another page on your site it does count as a tracking event.
But if a pop-up just pops up upon loading the site, a user must interact with the pop-up for the tracking event to occur.
They click so you're saying the visit becomes a non-bounce at that time. Thanks.
I have been trying to understand how is bounce rate related to popup. I just started showing a popup on one of my pages. It pops up after the visitor has been there for a minuter.The bounce rate for the popup is 80% whereas %Exit is 50%, does this make sense? 130% exited through the popup? I'm just confused, can you please advise?
It is confusing because there's no good explanation as to what bounce and exit rates are.
The bounce rate is not based on a page views; it is based of total entrances to the site via that page.
Bounce Rate = bounces divided by the number of Entrances. Exit Rate = exits divided by the number of page views.
Post a Comment