Bounce Rate: 17 Fool-Proof Ways to Keep it Low

When you have a website, you almost always want to attract the right kind of audience and retain their attention. You don’t want people to come to your website, only to visit once and leave. There are a number of measures you can employ to see if your website is able to catch the attention of your users or if it’s just making them go elsewhere. One of the measures is bounce rate.

Defining ‘Bounce Rate’

When a user lands on your website and without going to any other page, exits, that user is considered to be a bounced user. The bounce rate in turn, gives you the percentage of site visitors who exit from the landing page without checking out any other page of the website.

What does it mean to have a ‘high’ or a ‘low’ bounce rate?

When a website has a high bounce rate, chances are that the people coming to your website aren’t finding things of interest to them and therefore, they are leaving without engaging with the website further. If a website has a low bounce rate, chances are a user finds the content on your website relevant and so they decide to explore further by going to various other pages of the website.

Source: Digital Marketing and Analytics

When is a high bounce rate not necessarily bad?

The bounce rate of your website can change if you start considering and set various actions on your landing page as “events”. For instance, it could be a video play, a page scroll beyond a certain point etc.

When a user comes to your website and leaves without going to any other page BUT does play the video or scrolls through the landing page beyond the set point, the user won’t be considered a bounced user as he did register an interaction with the website.

When the interactions of your interest aren’t marked as “events”, chances are all users who come to the landing page of your website and leave even after a playing a video will be considered as bounced, and thus your bounce rate will be a lot higher than it should be.

What can cause a high bounce rate?

It could be any or all of the following reasons:

• The landing page of your website doesn’t give the relevant information in the right way.
• Your website takes a lot of time to load.
• You have a single-page website.

How Google Analytics calculate Bounce Rate?

Source: Kissmetrics

17 Fool-Proof ways to reduce bounce rate:

Reducing bounce rate involves the collective effort of people managing the site, its marketing and analytics. Bounce rate at end of day is a quick shot indicator of traffic that comes to the site and the experience they have on the first page of your site. Below are some ways that can help reduce bounce rate for your site:

1. Use Analytics for Your Advantage

• Make sure that the analytics code is setup correctly on all site pages and ensure there are no multiple codes present on your website for the same analytics account either for Google Analytics or for Google Tag Manager.
• Exclude all spam traffic in Google Analytics by creating a dedicated view in GA which contains spam filters along with all the other filters used for your analytics setup.
• Add GA events on site landing pages for any useful user engagement actions you’d like to track. For instance, social media shares, sign up for newsletters etc.

2. Have a Clear Purpose of Your Website

Before you start developing, it’s advisable that you define what purpose your website is intended to fulfill. Answering the following questions will help you do that:

• Who is your target audience?
• Where are they located?
• What is the problem they are facing?
• How often do they search?
• Is your site solving a problem of your audience?

If you have a fair idea about your target audience and what your website can do for them, then you can go on to creating your Google Analytics account and start tracking your site. The first thing you should do is to set goals in your analytics account. This will help you see the number of goal conversions on your site. If you see any goal conversions, it probably means you are on the right track.

3. For the Landing Page

• The landing page should be simple and easy to navigate for users.
• Define the purpose of your landing pages.
• To check how your landing pages are performing, open your analytics reporting tab and navigate to Acquisition >> Search Console >> Landing pages

4. For the Load Time

• The load time for your web-page should be 3 seconds or less.
• The images should be optimized before uploading.
• It’s recommended you use CDN for images..
• Minify JS and CSS.
• Enable compression.
• Remove unwanted widgets and plugins.
• Reduce http requests.
• Check site speed metrics in GA by navigating to Behavior >> Site Speed >> Overview
• 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website helped me speed up my site loading time

5. For Irrelevant Content

• Review all the content on your website and remove whatever seems irrelevant.
• Be specific to your goals.
• Stop creating content for the low value keywords.
• Improve old content which seems important. .
• Use behavior flow reports to find which content is more engaging.

6. Open link in a New Tab

• Always open links in new tab to keep the bounce rate low.
• <a href=”www.google.com" target=”_blank” />

7. Make the Website User Friendly

• Users should find it easy to navigate on your site.
• Make things easier to find and understand for the user.
• Enable users to fill forms easily.
• Make your website more user friendly by reading through 3 Tips to Make Your Website More User Friendly

8. Make the Website Mobile Friendly

• If the website does not open properly on mobile, users will immediately quit.
• Check your mobile visitors performance in GA by navigating to Audience >> Mobile >> Overview

9. Stop Irrelevant Ads

• Make sure your website is not crowded with irrelevant or too many ads.Show ads that are relevant to the content.

10. Use the Appropriate Channels

• Target the right audience.
• If the targets aren’t placed correctly, there is a chance people will not
• engage with your content as it won’t reach the relevant people.
• Find who’s your relevant audience before promoting.
• Check the most engaging channels Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels.
• Learn How to Choose Best Digital Marketing Channels for your Business

11. Fresh Content

• Keep your site up to date with fresh content.
• 21 Ways to Develop Fresh Content Ideas for Your Blog

12. Pop-Ups

• Google will punish sites that use annoying pop-up ads
• Avoid the inclusion of unnecessary pop ups.

13. Enable Internal Search

• Add internal search to your site to help users find content easily.
• It also gives you an idea of what users are searching for.
• This will make your keyword research process easy.
• Activate the site search feature in your GA account.
• Check search terms Behavior >> Site Search >> Overview.

14. Include Related Posts

• Add related posts to your content.
• Try to link your posts to internal related posts.
• This will engage the visitors with more than one post.
• Adding related posts between the content is more useful than adding at the end

15. Fonts & Formating

• Use good fonts and make the text readable
• 16 Rules of Blog Writing and Layout will help you improve site layout and writing

16. Quality Images

• Use high quality images.
• Use images relevant to the content.
• Use alt tag with images
• Use free high quality images for your blog
• Find 50+ Amazing Sites with Free Stock Photos

17. Target Relevant Campaigns

• Stop targeting campaigns with lower audience engagement.
• Track your campaign data Acquisition >> Campaigns >> All campaign

In a nutshell, if you are able to employ the above steps, it will help you reduce your bounce rate to an optimal level. If you have any other tips and tricks, don’t hesitate to leave your comments below!

Researched and Edited by Noman & Riffat

Originally published at marketlytics.com on August 24, 2016.