When it comes to analysis of your website performance & tracking visitors sources, numbers in which they arrived & their loyalty, bounce rate is an crucial aspect that cannot be neglected. But what is Bounce rate & how is it important? Understanding that is really important for webmasters.
Bounce rate is the percentage or amount of visitors who leave your website after arriving at the entry page. Entry page can be your website home page or any other page that is firstly visited by the visitor. These are visitors who ‘bounce away’ after arriving without viewing other pages on your website. You can easily find your website’s bounce rate by using statistics tools like Google Analytics.
Google Defines Bounce Rate as:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
A Lower Bounce Rate means Visitors are stopping & exploring your website. They are finding that they want. Your website is successful in providing them a better conetnt. So, our aim is to lower the bounce rate as much as we can.
A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail meaning that they are more engaged with your content. High bounce rates of over 60% require immediate attention.
Below find some tips to help you reduce your bounce rate and increase visitors’ loyalty.
Page Titles
Make titles exact & suitable as the covering content. Most times a wrong page headline can make your visitors quickly click the back button. Your headline should make visitors want to continue reading. Typically when you visit a website you begin by reading the headline. If the headline connects with you then you begin reading the contents of the page.
Add Photos, Videos or Screen Shots to Catch Attention
Adding a nice screen shot of your product or a photo will cause visitors to give a second look. Use a good caption below the picture to grab their attention and make them interested. Embedded videos are a great way to reduce bounce rate since it takes time to view a video. But these should be appropriate with the content.
Improve the Web Page Loading Time
Visitors tend to click the back button if the page takes long to load. Optimize your HTML code, remove unwanted images and optimize your images. Consider a new website design. Go for a simple, practical but decent looking design. Make use of cache plugins, if you are using WordPress.
Improved Navigation
Navigation facility on your website is the key to get lower bounce rates. Assume that your visitor knows nothing about your site. Assume that they want more information. Make navigation points easy to access, position links around content. There are many ways to orient your visitors and the most important principle is to make the links highly visible and relevant to the current page.
Test your Web Pages
Test your website with a group of users. Ask them to enter your site from specific pages. Get feedback based on their experiences. This will give you ways to improve.
To best achieve this, you should regularly analyze and study your bounce rate. After collecting data, implement changes to your website and see if the bounce rate improves. Also, determine how it affects your goals. Finally, make changes if necessary.
If you’ve not paid any attention to your bounce rate before, try starting today. It might help you to dramatically improve your website.
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