Are Your Bounce Rate Metrics Creating More Questions than Answers?
Date: June 10, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
If you are new to website analytics this is probably the case. Even the most experienced SEO analysts often find themselves scratching their heads and mumbling when examining bounce rate data.
You may be scratching your head and mumbling to yourself what are bounce rates in the first place?
Bounce rates are a page metric that tells you the number of visitors who came to a particular page and then left the site without visiting another page or otherwise interacting with that page. This differs from an exit page which where the visitor left the site after visiting multiple pages.
The best advice I can give you on how to react to your bounce rate data is to be patient.
The information provided by tools such as Google Analytics and Piwik is precise and often overwhelming, but the interpretation of this data is never more subjective than when it comes to bounce rate statistics. If someone sits down and looks at your site performance over the past month and tells you that your bounce rates are high and need to be improved, hopefully you can thank them for their time and send them on their way without giving them a dime.
All bounce rates can be improved but what is considered a high or low bounce rate is dependent on a list of factors that can only be determined by long term analysis. Furthermore, many pages that successfully accomplish their goal such as contact pages or an information page will get a bounce as users arrive, find the phone number or information they are looking for and leave the site. Mission accomplished for these pages, but they still get credited with a bounce. This type of page interaction is much more common with mobile web surfers who want quick answers and consequently mobile and responsive sites will see higher bounce rates across the board. However people arriving at a non responsive site from a mobile device will have an even higher bounce rate still as they just can’t find what they are looking for. As you can see the contributing factors to bounce rates are as convoluted as Google’s algorithm itself.
So what use is bounce rate data?
Not much on it’s own, but if you are willing to dust off your monitor and examine all the factors relating to your bounce rate you can determine which high bounce rates actually have a negative affect on your ultimate goal, which generally is a conversion from potential customer to customer.
Tips on making bounce rate data relevant.
Gather a metrics sampling over a period of time before you start adjusting your site. I would recommend using a tool that gives you specific page information that you can dump into a spreadsheet as we are going to want to eliminate all the pages we expect to see a lot of bounces on. Then you are going to want to cross reference them with keyword data as you will expect to see high bounce rates with keywords that have little or nothing to do with your site and eliminate those. Now we are getting down to the proverbial nitty gritty. Important landing pages where users were actually looking for content related to your page are the ones you really want to work your bounce rate magic on. Efforts put forth to improve bounce rates on those pages we eliminated will yield minimal results and trust me there is plenty of work to do on the important pages.
8 steps to improve the bounce rate of your significant pages
1. Easily viewed and operated navigation
This can not be undervalued whether you are discussing bounce rates or site health in general. Making things difficult to find always frustrates visitors or often makes them feel dumb. Not everybody likes feeling dumb so they usually abandon your site for one that makes them feel smarter (you know the ones with clear, sensible navigation). A well structured main navigation without too many sublayers and a reasonable amount of call to action buttons will serve you well in your quest to reduce bounce rates. Always remember, for your customers arriving from a search page, a very long list of topic related links is just one back click away, so your links better be easy to find.
2. Pay Special Attention to Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
What your potential visitor views in the SERPS(search engine result pages) will have obvious effects on your bounce rate as you do a better job of attracting visitors that your site is looking to convert.
3. Make your message stand out immediately
As the old saying goes, time is money and in this modern era people are not going to read your 1500 word essay to find what they are looking for. The best way to do this is to keep your information segmented, well labeled and specific. Avoid long winded, unmarked, chapter style writing that is best left to the print medium.
4. Have a responsive design
As previously stated nobody is going to stick around and read your miniscule print on their mobile devices unless they have to, and with all the competition out there they probably don’t have to. Tip number 1 is also very important here.
5. Place an easily visible insite search box on every page
Give your visitor an option. If they don’t immediately see what they are looking for would you rather have them back page to the SERP or use your in site search box to drill down to specific information on your website? That question was rhetorical.
6. Avoid popups
Of course you want to call attention to specific offers or points of interest on your site, but popups are just a turn off.
7. Keep your page load times down
Not everybody likes to wait and people will often back out of a site that is slow to load. For more information on improving your site load times check out some of my recent articles.
8. Limit outbound links
Obviously giving your visitor the opportunity to leave your site with a click will have adverse effects on your bounce rate, but may be great for user experience. Opening outbound links in a new tab can help but both Google and Piwik will count an unused open tab as a bounce after 30 minutes. It is possible in many of the analytics tools out there to set up the outbound links as events which will discount them as a bounce when the event is triggered.
As you can see there are plenty of basic things you can do to improve your website’s bounce rates but before you go constantly tweaking your content it is important to get a baseline metric for the bounce rates on your site and then work it down from there. For a hitter in baseball a 65% fail rate will get you into the hall of fame, and although it doesn’t sound very good this may be an exceptionally good bounce rate for a website in your industry. The only way you can really know for sure is to spend the time and look for positive trends. Or if you’re a dentist you are in luck, you can just simply hire a great SEO company like Infinity Dental Web to do the work for you.
In my next article we’ll discuss another great tool that can help you with bounce rates as well as a number of other conversion issues…stay tuned for A/B testing 101.