The odds of converting website visitors to customers become higher when visitors navigate to more than one page. So when they don’t go further beyond your landing page but instead click away, your business might be suffering loss. Knowing your bounce rate and how it compares to other websites in your industry is important if you are to properly optimize your page to its maximum conversion effectiveness.
What is a Bounce Rate?
A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a particular website after viewing only one page. Your bounce rate will help you determine the number of quality visitors you are attracting and may provide you with clues as to your site’s effectiveness.
Bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of visits to only one page by the total number of visits to the whole website. An average bounce rate for all websites is around 40.5%, and a figure higher than that could indicate your website is not as effective as it should be. Google Analytics is one of the tools that will help you determine your bounce rate, along with a host of other valuable information.
Bounce Rate varies by industry
Just because your website has a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean it is not successful. The bounce rate varies greatly from one industry to another, and can therefore be between 10% and 90%. Simple landing pages with a single call to action tend to have the highest bounce rates – and this is completely fine because there is no need for people to visit another page to find what they are looking for. As such, if you have a single-page website, having a high bounce rate is not necessarily cause for alarm. An average bounce rate for self-service sites are normally the lowest, since people must navigate through multiple pages when performing certain actions.
Factors that influence Bounce Rate
Your search engine ranking plays a key role in your bounce rate. Sites that rank very high for irrelevant keywords tend to have higher bounce rates because the visitors fail to find what they are looking for on them. Therefore, be sure to check Google Webmaster tools for your ranking keywords.
The design of your website will also affect bounce rate, especially if you have too many pop-up ads, surveys, or streaming videos. If your page is not optimized for your targeted audience or does not fulfill its advertised purpose, visitors are more likely to leave without clicking on any additional links, thereby making your bounce rate higher.
Improving Bounce Rate
The best thing you can do to decrease your bounce rate is to improve your search engine rankings for industry-relevant terms. Don’t discount the possibility that you’re simply attracting the wrong audience, rather than not engaging them effectively. Provide engaging content for your readers to keep them focused and entertained once they arrive. Make every effort to ensure your pages load quickly. Google’s PageSpeed extension will help you analyze your website so you can apply changes that will help it load faster.
It’s important to note that your bounce rate changes over time, particularly if you alter your website in any way. For this reason, you must monitor your bounce rate to ensure it does not fluctuate drastically.
