Biz Extra
Published: August 24, 2021 | Updated: 25th August 2021
Are you finding a lot of people visit your website and leave after viewing one page, asks Natalka Antoniuk, Marketing Manager, Digital Storm.
Maybe they don’t hang around long enough to understand your business and view your unique offering. This is what we refer to as your bounce rate.
Bounce rate is a term used in website analysis to describe the percentage of visitors that exit your site rather than continuing to another page. We look at this figure to determine how well a page’s content appeals to the target audience.
There are several reasons that your website might have a high bounce rate. It could be down to technical issues or loading speed. Most people don’t like waiting more than 6 seconds for a web page to load. With so many options on the search engine results page users won’t think twice before jumping off and moving to a quicker site.
Another reason could be the device that they’re using. Perhaps you’ve designed your website with desktop users in mind. This could work really well for you, but if data suggests that most of your traffic is coming from mobile devices then you might need to rethink your design.
One of the first things we would look at if we noticed a high bounce rate is content. Does your content appeal to the type of people who are visiting your site?
There are two ways you can work this out.
Firstly, how do your users arrive on your website? Is it through paid search marketing? Organically? What is the search intent for the keywords you are ranking for?
Search intent gives us a fantastic idea about the type of people landing on our website. Someone searching for ‘best mother’s day gifts’ is researching ideas and gathering information with the intention to buy in the future. On the other hand, someone searching for ‘women’s shoe sale’ shows clear intention to make a purchase.
The second way to work it out is to look at the number of pages per session. This figure goes hand in hand with bounce rate and clearly outlines how relevant your content is to a particular user. The more pages a single user visits, the more engaged they are with your content.
Your website’s bounce rate will depend on a number of factors. Firstly, is the page a purposely designed landing page or blog post? Typically, you would expect users’ to leave these pages once they’ve got what they came for, leading to an average bounce rate of 60%-90%.
Pages designed for lead generation perform much better, with an average bounce rate between 30% – 55%. Before handing over personal information, users’ will likely do a bit more digging to find out who you are and what you do. This means they’ll spend longer on the site, moving from page to page, before they commit.
The industry with the best bounce rate is eCommerce and retail. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense. Users will be browsing multiple products, checking out different categories and reading reviews. Even if they don’t make a purchase, they’re much more likely to explore more pages per session.
All that makes it pretty difficult to give you an average bounce rate. In general, it’s safe to assume that a bounce rate of 60% or less means you’ve got a healthy website.
A high bounce rate can negatively impact where you rank in the search engine results pages. If users aren’t finding the information they expected to see, they’ll leave your site. This behaviour will lead search engines to believe your site isn’t accurately serving relevant content to a certain search term.
If the bounce rate is something you’re concerned about then stop worrying! There are 3 easy steps that you can take to reduce your bounce rate and keep people on your website for longer.
If a key landing page on your website takes a long time to load, you’ll cause users to leave before they’ve had a chance to consume any content. With 100,000’s of options on the results page, they’ve got plenty of options if your page isn’t quick enough.
Try reducing the size of the images you’re using on key landing pages and removing any unnecessary code that is causing delays. Another thing to consider is advertising. If you are part of Google’s display network then you’ll be adding time on to your load speed.
If you need help reducing your page load speed and want to talk to our web development team, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
If a user is searching for an answer to a question, they want to find that answer as quickly as possible. By putting the key content above the fold (before users have to scroll) you’re improving the user experience.
In doing so, you’re more likely to keep them engaged on the page. If you’re serving interesting, relevant content straight away – they’ll want to explore more of what you’ve got to offer.
One of the main reasons someone might abandon your website before visiting different pages is because it doesn’t work on the device that they’re using. We’ve all seen websites that perform poorly on mobile…
And most of us have left the site because of it.
Spend a little bit of time looking at your traffic analytics and find out which device people are using to look at your website. If it’s tablet or mobile, you might need to work on the design to make sure it is responsive.
Keep an eye out for buttons and links that are too close to each other and make sure you can read the resized text. Your goal is to deliver a user experience that is seamless on every device.
We love talking about bounce rates at Digital Storm. It’s a great insight into how users are interacting with your content. Not to mention a great way to measure how relevant you are to your target audience!
Now you know what we mean when we talk about bounce rate and some of the reasons your website might have a higher percentage than the industry average. I’ve also given you 3 tips that we always use to improve bounce rates.
The best part is, all of these steps are easy to manage yourself no matter how much experience you’ve got. If you do have any questions or want to have a chat with web experts then we’re only a phone call away.
