If you have a business website, you need to know your bounce rate. It’s that simple. The term refers to the percentage of visitors to your website who leave after visiting just a single page. In other words, who bounces after just visiting your landing page?
Understanding the bounce rate
So, why is it important to understand what your website’s bounce rate is? Well, it is an indication of how your visitors behave when they land on your website. They come to your website in several ways:
- Direct: They enter your domain name in the browser address bar and hit return;
- Social: They click a link on a social media network, like Facebook, Twitter or Linked In;
- Organic search: Someone entered some keywords into a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or Bing, and they clicked on one of the results that led them to your page;
- Paid search: You pay for an ad to be displayed by Google or another search engine when certain keywords are entered;
- Email: Perhaps you have an email marketing campaign, and someone clicked a link to your site in an email newsletter;
- Referral: This is a link from another site to yours; and
- Other: There might be some sort of tracking module in play that indicates from where traffic to your site originates.
While you will want to know how your visitors arrive (called acquisition), you also want to know where they land (sometimes called a landing page or an entrance page) and what they do from there. If you are trying to drive traffic to your website in order to get people to sign up for an email newsletter or to add a product in their shopping carts, then you want to know that they completed the action and didn’t just leave your website.
Generally, when an action is required, like filling out a form or adding an item to a shopping cart, the completion of the action will result in the user landing on a new page. For example, if you add an item in the cart, then at some point you will land on a new page in order to checkout.
Another example is filling out a form. A client recently asked me to help him find a solution to hiring people because recent help wanted ads in newspapers did not do the trick. We ended up creating a landing page highlighting the job and benefits. There was also a short form for the applicant to fill out. It wasn’t a true application, but enough to let the client know if he wanted to pursue the candidate further. When forms are filled out, there are some options as to what action follows a successful completion: A message will pop up and say thank you, we will be in touch, or you can direct the flow to a new page. This was the option we settled on because we would be able to see how many successful forms were filled out by the number of visits to the Thank You page.
What a high bounce rate means
When you log into your Google Analytics account, you will be able to check out your bounce rate. When you have a high bounce rate, it means a greater percentage of visitors to your website are leaving after visiting just a single page. Generally, you want a low bounce rate. You want people visiting your site and lingering, checking out other pages. A high bounce rate is not necessarily bad. Going back to this idea of filling out a form, if you had a message pop up after people subscribed to your email newsletter (instead of having the action land on a new page), then you might have achieved your goal. No harm; no foul.
But, it often means your visitors did not find the content on the particular page to be relevant to them. Over at the KissMetrics blog, they published an infographic showing some of the possible reasons for a high rate. Among the factors listed include having pop up ads, surveys or streaming music or videos; it takes too long to load the page; or the information is not what the person wanted.
That KissMetrics infographic also listed the average bounce rate for a variety of industries. I read a quote once where someone said it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20 percent, but if it were more than 35 percent he would be concerned. I am not sure how valid that is, given KissMetrics pointed out the average bounce rate is about 40.5 percent, and it is about 62 percent for first-time visitors. If you do have a high bounce rate, then you might want to optimize your page.
I am happy to say, Wooster Media Group’s bounce rate as of March 19, 2018, was slightly higher than 25 percent. People are coming to the site and checking out more than one page. I hope this is the case for your. Feel free to learn about search engine optimization here, and you can even schedule a free consultation with me here to see if there is any way I can help your business.
Note: If you are interested in text message marketing to help promote your business, then check out the special we have here.