Two Powerful ways to reduce bounce rate

  Analytics, Bounce Rate   27 Comments

Bounce rate is one of the most misunderstood metrics in Google Analytics. According to Google Analytics, bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions) or visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.

But what Exactly is Bounce Rate?

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

Here,

Bounces => Number of single page visits resulting from the page.

Entrances => Number of times visitors entered you site on the page

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 the pages on the website (in the same time period)

Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Here,

The bounce rate of the page 1 is calculated as: total bounces [(2070)/total entrances (2424)] *100 = 85.40%

The bounce rate of the home page ( / ) is calculated as: [total bounces (171)/total entrances (416)] *100 = 41.11%

The bounce rate of the website is calculated as: [total bounces (4039)/total entrances (5400)] *100 = 74.80%

 

As you can see from the calculations above, bounce rate of a web page/website has nothing to do with ‘Time spent on a web page/website’ (a common misconception about marketers and webmasters). Bounce rate can be a powerful metric to measure the quality of traffic to your website or landing pages. You should be bothered about high bounce rate. Here is one strong reason:

If site entrance pages are not relevant to your visitors then you can’t expect any conversion, sales or leads. Your whole purpose of setting up a website has no commercial value. So what should be the ideal bounce rate then. According to world famous analytics guru Avinash Kaushik:

 

Now the million dollar Question:

How to reduce bounce rate?

In this post i will answer this question using my certified Google Analytics Ninja skills analytics-ninja. So here we go

 

Step-1: Segment your traffic sources

Segment your website traffic like crazy, track down the culprits responsible for high bounce rate

Top Landing pages report in Google Analytics

Top Landing pages report in Google Analytics

I went to the ‘top landing pages’ report in Google Analytics. Then I clicked on the 1st page link, then selected ‘entrance sources’ from the ‘Analyze’ drop down menu, clicked on the ‘compare to site average’ button and then selected “bounce rate’ from ‘Individual source’ drop down menu . I ended up getting a report like this one:

We have successfully tracked down the hideout of the culprits. It’s Google

Now i need to know the exact keywords responsible for such high bounce rate. So i selected ‘keyword’ from the second drop down menu.

So my culprits are the keywords ’360 degree event management company’ and ‘top event management companies in delhi’. You have to do similar type of data segmentation if you are really serious about reducing the bounce rate.

 

Step-2: Interrogate the culprits (i.e. bad traffic sources) and fix them

Find out why they are responsible for high bounce rate. Following can be the reasons:

You are getting wrong type of traffic on your landing pages

Your website is getting the traffic which has nothing to do with the products/services you sell. Consequently they bounce the moment they arrive on your website. Determine the traffic source which is sending wrong traffic and then either stop the campaign or target the right keywords/ landing pages.

Your landing page doesn’t satisfy the visitor’s query. You are getting the right traffic but your landing page doesn’t satisfy the visitor’s query. For e.g. a visitor is looking for information on ‘available courses on business management in London’ and if your landing page gives general information about business management courses then the visitor is likely to bounce. This generally happens when you target wrong keywords.

 

Your call to action is not relevant to your landing page and vice versa. Your call to action (CTA) is causing visitors to come to your site and bounce. This call to action can be in the form of a button, banner, video or link on the pages of your site or some external site. In case of organic search the call to action can be in the form of title tag and meta description tag of the landing page. In case of paid search (like Google Adwords) the call to action can be in the form of title and description of your adwords ad copy. If your banner ad on a website reads ‘Download your free seo book now’ but then on a click takes a visitor to the home page of the site instead of the landing page which offers free download then expect high number of bounces. Fulfill your promise or expect a high bounce rate. Make sure that your CTA is as relevant as possible to your landing page and vice versa.

 

Lack of prominent call to action on your landing page- If your landing pages lacks CTA or does not prominently display CTA, then you will have hard time keeping visitors on your website. Headings, sub-headings and directional clues (to guide visitors to your CTA) are excellent way of prominently displaying your CTA. For e.g. this blog post is about reducing bounce rate and this is prominently displayed through h2 heading.

 

You have hard to consume contents on your landing page- Your landing page perfectly satisfy the visitor’s query but the content on the landing page is hard to consume in short span of time. So visitor may bookmark your page and return later in a different visit to consume the contents. In this case your bounce rate is going to be high. So develop contents which can be consumed in short span of time.

 

You have Ajax/Flash contents on your landing pages. In case of Ajax/Flash based contents/website, lot of users interaction (like clicking on an image/link; loading of a page/flash video/pop up etc) take place on a single page. So in majority of cases visitors don’t need to browse another pages on the site. Consequently the bounce rate is very high. In case of purely flash based website, bounce rate will be 100% all the time if users interactions are not tracked with virtual pageviews or event tracking. So track users interactions through virtual pageviews or event tracking.

 

Your landing page is not appealing. According to a recent research a visitor decides in 8 seconds or less whether to stay or leave your website. Poor page design, cluttering of ads, too much text, poor formatting, lack of headings and sub-headings are one of the main reason people leave your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Your main headline must highlight the benefit of reading any further. Use Google website optimizer to test different versions of your headings and landing pages. You can also use unbounce or visual website optimizer for this purpose.

 

Your landing page takes forever to download. If this is the case then expect 100% bounce rate all the time.

 

You have a single page website – If you have single page website then a visitor can never browse other pages on your website and so your bounce rate will always be 100%.

 

You run a blog- Blogs generally have high bounce rate because people generally leave the website after reading the latest blog post.

 

There is no need to explore your website any further. Every visitor who comes to your site has some purpose (like looking for a particular information, making a purchase etc). When this purpose is solved or unsolved, he leaves the website unless you give him some other purpose to browse your website further. For e.g a person looking for information on your company may leave your website from the landing page if the landing page fully satisfy his query about your company. If visit to the ‘About us’ page is one of your goal then you can get 100% conversion rate with 100% bounce rate.

This is one of the reason why even top landing pages have high bounce rate. Whether or not your landing page satisfies the visitor’s intent, you must always provide few more options to continue browsing. For e.g. “If you like this article you may like these articles too” or “similar products” or “related posts” etc. Similarly provide options to continue browsing ‘post conversion’ like links to browse further on the ‘thank you’ page or some other goal page. Develop a need to explore the site further.

 

What else you can do to reduce bounce rate?

The answer is Page Level Surveys. Add a thumbs up and thumb down button at the bottom of the landing pages (which don’t require a log in to be used) to get instant feedback from visitors regarding there reason for bounces. If your landing page has got lot of thumbs down, then there is a problem. You can also use kissinsights to get instant feedback through mini surveys.

This post is very much a work in progress. If you have more cool n analytics-ninjanga tips then please share in the comments below. If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow meon twitter.

 

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Himanshu Sharma About the Author: is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.

My business thrives on referrals, so I really appreciate recommendations to people who would benefit from my help. Please feel free to endorse/forward my LinkedIn Profile to your clients, colleagues, friends and others you feel would benefit from SEO, PPC or Web Analytics.

 

 

  • http://www.shahkaushal.com/ Kaushal Shah

    Hey there,

    Very nice analysis on traffic segmentation and bounce rate analysis. This will really help newbi and other seo experts in improving their website quality and traffic.

    Thanks for sharing!

  • http://Website Sajeet

    Hey Himanshu,

    I am a little confused here, as per Google Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of single page visits i.e. number of single page visits divided by the number of visits, but according to you “Entrances => Number of single page visits resulting from the page.” and as per the data that you have shown, ((Bounces/entrances) *100) is bounce rate where entrances is the denominator. could you please elaborate a little more on this.

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Sajeet! I made a mistake while editing the post. Bounces => Number of single page visits resulting from the page and Entrances => Number of times visitors entered you site on the page. Thanks for pointing it out. Very much appreciate that :)

  • http://Website catherine

    Another excellent article himanshu. I always wondered how bounce rate can be reduced. Thanks for explaining this topic in plain english.

  • http://Website John

    Well written and actionable post. Your post has helped me to optimize my bounce rate now. Thanks.

  • http://Website Matt

    You have great understanding of bounce rate and analytics in general. Thanks for the awesome post. I have bookmarked this post.

  • http://Website Jason

    great blog post. I am working on a client site which has very high bounce rate (82%) and this article is what i needed the most at this moment.

  • http://Website Martin Price

    Thanks for explaining about bounce rate. I would really appreciate if you write more posts on data segmentation.

  • http://leeksoup.wordpress.com Dina Avila

    This is a fascinating article. Thank you so much for helping to clarify something that can truly be confusing.
    I have a question regarding bounce rate. On my food photography blog, I set images and links to open in a new window, instead of opening in the same window as my blog. After reading this article, I wonder if that is encouraging people to move on from my blog? I imagine it could go either way. For example, opening in a new window means when they’re finished viewing the link, they’ll close out and return to my blog that is still opened.
    Anyway, rambling. Thoughts?
    Thanks!

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Dina! Thanks for stopping by. If your links and images open in a new window then your readers have never left your article page in the first place. They have just opened another page on your website. So in this case no bounce will be recorded by Google Analytics for your article page. Bounce will be recorded only when they leave your article page and move to some other website. If you provide a reason to explore your website further (at the end of your article like “related posts” )then your visitors might check out other articles on your website. In this way you can reduce your site bounce rate.

  • http://Website Ben

    Thanks for your post. It is really useful for us non-analytics webmasters.

  • http://Website Anil Kumar

    Hi Himanshu! I really love the way you pull information from GA and explain concepts in simple language. This post will help me in convincing my boss that bounce rate is an important metrics. Thanks.

  • http://Website Richard Burton

    I could not possible add anything more of value to this post. Simply awesome.

  • http://Website Ankur

    My website bounce rate is 92%. Is this a some sort of penalty?

    • seo himanshu

      High bounce rate is not a penalty. As i said earlier, you are either getting wrong type of traffic to your website or your landing pages don’t satisfy the visitors intent.

  • http://Website Domenick

    We are trying to bring down bounce rate for number of our clients’ websites. Will it help our rankings? Also is it possible to get a bounce rate below 20% or better 0%?

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Domenick! Many marketers believe that bounce rate has an impact on rankings. But i have yet to see any strong stats to prove this theory. Personally i have never seen a bounce rate less than 30% let alone 20 or less. And i don’t think it is possible to get 0% bounce rate.

  • http://Website sandy lease

    Hi,

    I run an ecommerce site which is getting good traffic. But my bounce rate has been going higher ever since i hired an agency for link building and content development. Please help.

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Sandy! Thanks for stopping by. You need to ask your agency why the bounce rate is so high. They may either be sending wrong type of traffic to your website or developing contents which has nothing to do with the products you sell.

  • http://www.priyank.me Priyank

    I really appreciate your post and it was superb .Thanks for sharing.I would like to hear more about this in future.

  • http://www.blackitsoft.com/inventory-pos-software.aspx inventory pos system

    I appreciate your post, thanks for sharing the post, i would like to hear more about this in future.

  • http://www.erocket.co.uk/ erocket

    Hi Himanshu, although presumably rare, I have seen an instance where a high bounce rate was being reported simply because of poor Analytics implementation. On an accommodation website, the Analytics code was absent from the bookings page, so that whenever people arrived at the home page, clicked on to booking page, and left from there, Analytics reported a bounce for these visitors. So a 12th item for your list could be to undertake a quick audit of navigational paths to ensure Analytics is installed throughout.

    • seo himanshu

      Yes this can be possible. Thanks.

  • http://www.seozy.com Vikas

    To add to the Bounce Rate issue, there are a lot of factors to be considered.

    The Bounce rate which we see in the Google Analytics is not something the search engines consider for quality purposes. Search engine consider the “Dwell Time” which is nothing but the time spent on a page by the visitor before leaving back to the search results page or closing the page (without going to any other page on the site).

    Also, there are two types of bounce rates: Actual Bounce Rate and Standard Bounce Rate

    Actual bounce rate: user visiting your page from search results page and leaving within a few seconds without navigating to any other page on the site. The bounce rate what you see in the Google Analytics program is nothing but the Actual Bounce Rate. This is a negative sign as the Dwell Time is just a few seconds.

    Standard bounce rate: A person visits a page with high quality content, reads the full content and then leave (spends more than 10 mins). Also, he doesn’t visit any other page on the site. This is still a bounce, but “Standard Bounce Rate”. Here this is not considered as a negative sign by the search engines as the Dwell Time is more than 10 mins!

  • http://www.inseoservices.com SEO Montreal

    Thanks, im going to make A/B test on my homepage to see if i can reduce bounce rate and grown the conversion rate.

    Francisco

  • manvesh

    Hello Himanshu,

    You have given some screen shots of GA are from old version right? I have just tried to find it in new version of GA but I didn’t get the the right way to find out bounce rate through the keywords. Please help me out.

    Thanks sharing your view.

    Regards,
    Manvesh

    • http://www.seotakeaways.com/ Himanshu

      At the time of writing this post, only old GA was available. In the new GA, you need to create a custom report so that you can see entrances and bounces for each traffic source in addition to bounce rate. This will solve your problem.