Analyzing Bounce Rate to Engage More Customers

Bounce rate refers to individuals who come to a page in your website and leave immediately --  they bounce in and out without engaging or clicking or converting. It can be disheartening to see a high bounce rate on a site in general, but when faced with a high bounce rate in a consumer marketing situation, it generally indicates one of two things:

1)    the value proposition being offered isn’t particularly compelling, or

2)    the traffic being sent to your site is not your ideal customer

To analyze the bounce rate, it’s important to look at all possible factors. Looking at the referring page to a site can often show that a particular website or search engine is sending unsuitable traffic to the site – that is, people who have no interest in your product. If there is a significant difference in the bounce rate for particular referring URLs, there may be a cause worth investigating (Kaushik, 2007).

Telling the right story to consumers is crucial, because when users are looking for one thing and encounter something different, they tend to not waste their time on your site. Additionally, it’s important to focus on basics such as clear navigation and slow load time for a page, things users simply take for granted as standards of any good website (Hartwig, 2013).

It’s also important to investigate the top trafficked pages in the site and to see what the bounce rate is for those. It’s possible that certain keyword searches are referring consumers to a particular page in a website, but without a discrete call to action on that page, or a page optimized to engage the reader with a properly designed path to follow, the user may just move on. Pages with the lowest bounce rates can serve as an example for the type of content and call to action that should be present on all your site pages, since those pages likely led to the visitor clicking through to another page (Hines, 2011).

Other ways to improve bounce rate are focused on aligning the content of the site with your customers’ searches. This would include refining the content across all pages to present users the specific content they are seeking and offering links within your pages to related pages on the site. If a redesign would improve the user’s ability to engage, then test multiple variations of that design to see which one generates the most engagement. A tool like a heatmap can show where users regularly hover on a page and what they are finding important on your site (Patel, 2012).

Finally, a great way to learn the reason for high bounce rates is to ask the customers themselves. Often, customers who don’t bounce out of the site can still offer great insight about difficulties using it.

The one place where a high bounce rate is acceptable? A blog. Because people generally come in through a referral or social media to read a particular post, often visitors will see only that page and move right along.

References

Hartwig, E. (2013, Nov 22). Bounce Rate. Retrieved Nov 3, 2014, from Mahsable: Metrics that Matter: http://mashable.com/2013/11/22/bounce-rate-metrics/

Hines, K. (2011, Nov 11). What You Can Learn from Bounce Rate & How to Improve It. Retrieved Nov 3, 2014, from KISSmetrics: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/what-you-can-learn-from-bounce-rate-how-to-improve-it/

Kaushik, A. (2007, Aug 6). Standard Metrics Revisited: #3: Bounce Rate. Retrieved Nov 3, 2014, from Occam's Razor: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/

Patel, N. (2012, Jan 5). 6 Easy-to-Get Insights That Can Boost Conversion Rates on Low-Performing Pages. Retrieved Nov 3, 2014, from KISSmetrics: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/boost-conversion-rates/