Perhaps among the most important website metrics accessible in Google Analytics is the “bounce rate”. Why? In order to answer this question, you need to first understand what bounce rate is.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors (out of all visitors) who bounce. For example, if 20 out of 100 website visitors “bounce”, then the bounce rate is 20%.
What is a Bounce?
A bounce occurs when a visitor enters a single page of a website and then leaves without doing anything else on that website. In other words, upon entering the initial (landing) page of the website, the website visitor does not click on any links, buttons or calls-to-action, nor do they visit a second page of the website.
Why is My Bounce Rate So High?
Content Not Relevant
A bounce can occur when the website visitor upon entering a website, quickly determines that the content on that page is not relevant to their needs, and subsequently leaves the website.
What this means is that your website has only seconds to convey to its visitors, who you are, what you do or sell and how that is relevant to what the website visitor is looking for, otherwise he or she will bounce.
Web Page Loads too Slowly
When people use search engines like Google, to find something they are interested in, no one wants to wait several seconds for a web page to load. This is particularly true for mobile devices such as smart phones when people are using a cellular network connection, which can be significantly slower than an office or home WiFi network.
It is for this reason you need to ensure that your website pages load quickly.
Page Not Found
A common scenario under which this occurs is that a website page with keyword relevant content moves to a different URL and no 301 Redirect has been set up, thus resulting in a “Page Not Found” or Error 404.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a method by which search engines, such as Google, and web visitors, are sent to a different website URL than they had originally requested.
Bot Traffic
Over the years, it bot traffic has been increasing steadily. Therefore, this may be one of the primary reasons why many websites have been experiencing an increase in their bounce rate.
What is a Bot?
A bot is simply defined as a type of software application that has been designed to carry out certain tasks such as gathering information.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic describes any non-human web traffic. There are many types of bots…search engine bots, scraper bots, spy bots, SEO crawler, etc.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
While answers to this very question vary widely, generally speaking, an average bounce rate might be considered to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% to 60%.
That said, there really is no specific bounce rate that is considered “good” for all websites.
How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate?
There are a few of things you can do to reduce your website bounce rate.
- Create unique, keyword relevant content with compelling calls-to-action and use accurate meta title and description tags for each web page.
- Improve the speed at which your web pages load.
- Fix Page Not Found Errors and all broken links.
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