Posted on Nov 1, 2017

How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate

Regardless of your industry, bounce rate is a website metric in Google Analytics that you should not ignore. It is easily one of the most valuable and misunderstood metrics.

You can have millions of visitors to your website every month, which sounds awesome. But, those website visits mean nothing unless you are actually converting leads and driving business.

What is a website bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from a single page without browsing any further. This number is not just inclusive of your home page. It accounts for all pages of your website.

Remember, bounce rate has nothing to do with the actual time someone may spend on your website.

How does Google Analytics calculate bounce rate?

Bounce rate is calculated on 2 levels within Google Analytics. They calculate bounce rate for a single web page and the bounce rate of your entire website.

Bounce rate of a web page = total number of bounces, or single page visits, on a page (in a given time period) / total number of entrances on that page (in the same time period)

Bounce rate of a website = total number of bounces across all the pages on the website (in a given time period) / total number of entrances across all pages on the website (in the same time period)

For tips and explanations straight from the source, visit the Google Analytics Bounce Rate Forum.

What is a good average bounce rate?

The average bounce rate will vary by industry. 21 Handshake offers some key industry insights on how to find your industry bounce rate.

In general, B2B websites tend to have a higher average bounce rate of around 30%-50%. Service sites fall on the lower end of the spectrum with average bounce rates of 10%-30%. B2C sites hover around the 20%-40% range. Landing pages normally encountered through advertising with a set call to action (CTA) have the highest bounce rates of around 70%-90%.

How can you improve your bounce rate?

Lowering your bounce rate is not something that will happen over night. You’ll need to invest time into setting up and testing a process to find what works best for your niche. But, your efforts will pay off and you will be surprised at the impact these 5 methods will have on your bounce rate.

Method 1: Attract the right visitors

Just because you have thousands or millions of website hits does not mean that they are your ideal customer. You may not be the solution to the problem they are looking to answer. Therefore it is critical to understand the demographic you need to attract that will ultimately lead to higher conversion.

Choose the right keywords and search terms to be included in titles, header tags, and descriptions on your website pages. Utilize Google’s Keyword Planner if you aren’t already. Use analytics to find your most popular content and web pages and work on optimizing these outlets.

Method 2: Encourage engagement

Though it is the most ideal situation to have a website visitor purchase immediately and fork over their money, this unfortunately is not the case in everyday life. It takes six to eight touches on average to generate a viable sales lead. With this in mind, it is important to think of data as the new currency. Collecting email addresses and contact information from your potential customers is vital. This gives you the opportunity to stay in touch with website visitors until they are ready to convert into a paying customer.

If you have taken step 1 to heart and shifted focus into optimizing website content for your ideal customer, you will know the exact information that will persuade visitors to give you their contact information.

Method 3: Setup a remarketing strategy

Remarketing allows you to target people who have recently visited your website. You can grow your email list and execute coordinated efforts by showcasing customized ads to remind people of your service or offerings.

Google offers remarketing with their Adwords platform and there are tons of other platforms offering similar services such as Adroll, Facebook, or Convertro.

Method 4: Segment your website leads

To help your bounce rate it’s important to nurture the website leads you gained via methods 1 through 3. You’ll want to identify what stage leads are at in your specific sales cycle and segment your email lists based on this data. This way you can start sending customized emails and advertisements that address the unique needs of each stage.

Be sure to load your emails with effective copy, images, and keep an eye on your email metrics. This will come in handy when measuring how much engagement your emails spur based on open rates, click-through rates, and even conversions. You won’t build the perfect email overnight, so remember to test and refine your campaigns on a regular basis to achieve better results.

Method 5: Pay attention to your backend development

Some people become so focused on keywords and front end search engine optimization (SEO) that they ignore the importance of optimization from a web development and back-end infrastructure side. Not only does Google heavily penalize websites with slow load times and keyword stuffing, but your customers will penalize you too. You have one chance to impress a customer, don’t ruin it by making them wait for a slow, unresponsive website that is awkwardly crammed with keywords. This is a huge red flag for any customer and will lead to a high bounce rate.

Take time to invest in the back-end development of your website. Not only will your customers thank you, but you will get the added benefit of better organic searchability and rankings with Google.