Bounce rate is one of the most underrated statistics in your website data. As an indicator of both the quality and relevance of content on your web pages, it shouldn’t be ignored. It gives insight into the effectiveness of campaigns and content, instead of relying on conversion rate alone.

Bounce rate is the percent of single page visits: the visitor arrived at your site and left without viewing any pages except the one they landed on.  Every page on your site has the potential to be a landing page – not just your homepage. Landing pages must be compelling to keep visitors on your site and convince them to click deeper.

To see which pages have the highest bounce rate on your site go to Content > Top Content in Google Analytics. Bounce Rate is one of the column headers. Click the header to sort based on this metric.  A good bounce rate is between 20 and 50%. It’s difficult to get a rate consistently below 20% as people make accidental clicks that you can’t control. Show concern for rates over 50%; there is room for improvement.

Relevant content is less bouncy

Why do people bounce? Usually it’s because they don’t see any relevant content. Relevance has two interpretations, however:

1. The content is not relevant to them. In this case the person was not qualified or part of your target market anyway.  However, this could indicate misleading content on the page or within the link that led them to the page in the first place.
2. They didn’t see anything relevant, due to:

- disorganized page layout or distracting elements

- poor quality or badly written content that doesn’t give off scent

- too much or not enough content

Sometimes high bounce is good

If you have an information site that people return to on a regular basis, don’t be misled by a high bounce rate. For example, I visit theweathernetwork.com every morning. I have the Halifax page bookmarked so I launch the site, view the forecast and then leave. I would be tracked as a bounce, but the site was very relevant and useful. So if you have visitors with similar behaviour, segment bounces based on new vs. returning visitors and focus on the new ones!

4 ways to minimize bounce

• Ensure visitor’s expectations are met. If your ad copy promises high efficiency, low eco-footprint widgets, then the landing page should speak to this.
• Improve headlines. The headline is the first message people will read. Use your keywords in the headline so visitors quickly recognize they are in the right place.
• Improve title and meta tags. For those arriving from search engine results pages (SERPs), make sure all pages on your site have well crafted title tags and meta descriptions. These are displayed on the SERP and visitors rely on them to decide whether to click into your website.
• Optimize referral links. Sort your referral traffic based on bounce rate as well. For those with a high bounce, evaluate the quality of the link and your choice of landing page.  See my September article on improving referral traffic for more details.

Keep an eye on bounce rate, for an easy way to identify potential issues with your website quality and ensure a positive user experience for your visitors.

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