What is a Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website without visiting other pages

• The bounce rate is calculated by dividing single-page sessions by the total visits.
• According to RocketFuel, an average bounce rate should range from 41% to 55%.
• The single-page bounce rate metric gives you an idea about the quality of a certain page and the site-wide bounce rate will help you analyze the overall engagement rate on your site.
• The higher the bounce rate, the less effective your site is in engaging visitors.

A high bounce rate will affect your site’s conversion rate so it is very important to improve your bounce rate.

Your conversion rate is the number of users that complete a set goal. The goal could be anything from completing a purchase to signing up for an email list.

Now, you may be wondering: what is a good bounce rate for your website?

A good bounce rate is dependent on the goal of any particular page. The bounce rate on only a single page will differ from the bounce rate on more than one page, and landing pages for example often have much higher bounce rates than other site content.

So, there’s no one-fit-all answer. It really depends on your goals and target audience but one thing is for sure, a bad bounce rate means that you are losing high-value traffic.

No matter what business you are into, measuring your bounce rate offers valuable insights that help you judge your website’s user experience. This will translate into more conversions and better engagement.

Bounce rates explained

Bounce rates, sometimes referred to as the exit rate, are a fact of running any website or eCommerce site.

You have to expect that some visitors stay and some visitors leave, it’s perfectly normal for a website’s bounce rate to be between 40 and 50%.

A blog page, single page site, or landing page bounce rate may even be as high as 70%, although this would generally be considered a poor number for another page’s bounce rate.

A bad bounce rate on conversion-focused pages, like product pages, is a cause for concern and improving bounce rates in places like this can really help you to convert more efficiently.

Dig deeper into the information on your Google Analytics server to try and work out the cause. Your Google Analytics server can offer an in-depth web pages report of your entire site or you can look at the bounce rates for a single page session.

High bounce rates might be linked to website factors such as site speed or page load time, but it could also be the result of poor marketing campaigns which promise the user a different experience to what is found on your website (more on this later).

Using Google Analytics to track your bounce rate

There are several tools for monitoring your bounce rate. Google Analytics is one of the most widely used services for tracking all kinds of site performance metrics.

The bounce rate can be calculated as single-page sessions divided by total sessions.

In other words, Google Analytics, like all bounce rate tracking software, considers all the sessions when a user visited a single page. This is divided by all sessions to get the bounce rate.

Google Analytics shows you the average bounce rate of your pages. This helps you see which parts of your website need work.

With Google Analytics, you can clearly see that some parts of your website, for example the homepage, might have a low bounce rate. However, you might also find out from Google Analytics that certain landing pages aren’t performing well.

By keeping track of your site’s performance on Google Analytics, you can quickly identify which pages have a high bounce rate and need to be modified. This helps you work efficiently.

Reasons why your bounce rate might be high

Here are a few reasons that may be responsible for a high bounce rate on your website:

• Poor user experience — When visitors can’t easily exactly what they need, they leave and this increases the bounce rate. Many factors are involved, including excessive pop-ups and ads, complicated navigation, and a lack of important pages like About and Contact.
• Bad website design — is often the result of unorganized navigation, a lack of white space, and a non-uniform distribution of web design elements such as images, content, and hyperlinks on your site pages. If your users don’t find your web design engaging and useful, they are bound to leave and increase the bounce rate.
• Slow loading speed — seconds matter when it comes to website loading speed and are vital to the bounce rate. Even a 100-millisecond delay in load time can impact the conversion rate by 7%. Slow website speeds can also turn down a good number of your users.
• Bad and outdated content — having outdated information on your website can be one of the reasons why visitors bounced from a site. For example, blog posts with bad target keywords, tutorials, and even contact information that isn’t valid anymore can affect the bounce rate.
• SEO trouble – check the meta title, title tag, and meta description. All individual pages should match up to the search intent. User intent is important for the bounce rate.
• Technical errors — broken internal links, shrunken images, bad typography, inconsistent design, and a poorly optimized checkout experience may cause a high bounce rate.
• Non-responsive website — with the majority of people browsing the internet from mobile devices, having a responsive website has never been more important. If your site does not adapt well to all screen sizes, you will have increased bounce rates.

These elements are just a few possible reasons for a high bounce rate. That’s why it’s very important to keep track of how all the pages on your site perform.

7 easy ways to lower your bounce rate

Since a high bounce rate is an indicator of issues on your website, let’s review improvement strategies in order to better your website’s bounce rates.

1. Implement strong call-to-action buttons

Strong and effective call-to-action buttons go a long way in attracting visitors to explore other pages on your site and to reducing the exit rate.

While designing CTAs, you must consider everything from its size to placement and color. The top three CTA colors to use are red, green, orange or yellow.

You should also consider the placement of your CTA buttons.

Generally, we read from top to bottom and left to right. Placing the call to action button at the bottom or to the right of your copy is proven to be more effective than other placements.

The copy of your CTA significantly influences your user’s decision.

For getting the most out of your CTAs, consider using action-inducing words such as secure, get, join, or try instead of dry words like submit, and enter.

Research shows that personalized CTAs perform 20% better than a normal call to action button. Also, showing how a person can benefit from clicking on the button will also help a lot.

Here’s an example from Zyro’s homepage:

Run A/B testing

Analyzing your website helps identify pain points you can address to reduce the bounce rate.

For instance, you may find that a few of your web pages aren’t performing well. Now that could be due to several reasons: the copy, images, color scheme, or the CTA placement on one page.

Running A/B testing will help you create a landing page tailored for the best UX. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind before getting started.

• Start with one variable element. While it’s tempting to change several web page elements together, it’s a better idea to only change one at a time. Otherwise, you won’t be able to predict which change influenced the performance.
• Be specific about the end-result. Before you even start your A/B testing, determine what you are seeking to achieve. Is it about conversions or user engagement? Whatever it is, be specific. You won’t change the whole site’s bounce rate with one A/B test but you could improve the exit rate on a specific page.
• Divide the sample group equally. Make sure you show each web page design to the same number of users. You may need to perform the test a couple of times to get conclusive results.

Make your site mobile friendly

The majority of users use mobile devices to surf online. Mobile responsiveness is a ranking factor and you must ensure your website is highly responsive. It is essential that every page on your site can serve mobile users.

Zyro makes it easy to create exceptional mobile-friendly websites. It has an AI-powered website builder that’s easy to use and has a number of helpful tools.

With Zyro, you can get started with a pre-built website template that’s responsive and SEO-friendly and will reduce user bounces.

The website builder also offers features including a Logo Maker, AI-Heatmap, Slogan Generator, and an AI-Writer.

Ensure good navigation

The last thing you want is to confuse users with intricate navigation. A few things you should keep in mind while designing your primary menu are:

• Group content to categories — while designing your navigation, make sure that similar content is grouped together.
• Blog posts, products, services, and other elements that go together by topic.
• Avoid overcrowding the menu —avoid the temptation to fill in all the empty space with unnecessary links.
• Just because something can go in the menu doesn’t mean it should.
• Add icons when needed —icons add elegance and beauty to your main navigation in a subtle way.
• Contact sections, social media buttons, and other elements of your site can benefit from this.
• Avoid using drop-down with more than two levels — drop-down menus any more than two levels will ruin the usability and bring down the user experience of your website.

Get rid of spammy pop-ups

Pop-ups are a great way to increase conversions, but you shouldn’t overuse them.

If you really need a pop-up, make sure it’s triggered at an appropriate time.

For instance, you don’t want to overwhelm your users by showing them pop-ups the moment they visit your landing page.

Instead, the pop-up should appear after a certain time interval. You may consider setting an exit-intent popup.

Create high-quality content

Content plays a big role in the overall success of your website.

First of all, quality, SEO-friendly content will help you rank high on search engine results. The higher you rank in search results, the more people will see and visit your site in the first place.

What is more, informative content will compel people to explore your website, as it helps to establish authority in your niche. This will result in a low bounce rate and more conversions.

When creating content, ensure it is factually correct, well written and engaging. Do not plagiarise others and stay relevant to your niche.

Bounce rate recap

In this article, you have learned what bounce rate is, and why it’s important.

A high bounce rate is a challenge every business owner encounters at one point or another.

However, by improving your site’s performance, you can easily minimize the number of users bouncing from your site.

Ensure your site is responsive, fast, intuitive, and content-rich.

You should continue optimizing its performance through strategic A/B testing.

Make the user’s journey as seamless as possible, and you will be able to minimize the bounce rate to a great extent.