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Most people are horrified when they learn that as much as 80% of their website visitors are leaving their sites without engaging at all, and rightly so. Traffic can be expensive, so encouraging visitors to stick around longer can make a lot more sense than simply throwing more traffic at an under-performing website.

In this episode of The Thinkplus Digital Marketing Podcast, Tim and Lozz discuss the all-important bounce rate metric: what it means, what it should be, and, most importantly, how to reduce it. If you’d like to convert more of your existing website traffic into customers and reduce your wasted ad spend, you won’t want to miss this.

To read our blog guide: ‘What is a good bounce rate?’, head to www.exposureninja.com/bounce-rate

Show Notes

What is bounce rate?

Google’s definition: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). This is not strictly 100% accurate, but it keeps things simple and is a useful approximation.

How do I find my bounce rate?

Inside Google Analytics, head to Audience -> Overview where you’ll see your website’s overall bounce rate. 

Each traffic source, page and device also has its own bounce rate, and these can be helpful in diagnosing the cause of a high overall bounce rate, as well as picking up problems in specific areas.

This site’s high bounce rate from social skews the average bounce rate

What is a typical bounce rate?

This will depend on a few things:

• Where your audience is coming from. Traffic from different sources has different behaviour. Desktop organic traffic tends to bounce at around 30-34% vs social mobile traffic, which can bounce into the 70s and 80 percents
• What’s on your pages. Whether you are driving people to landing pages or blog posts, for example

Ballpark bounce rates tend to be 40% to 50% for a typical site, and 60-70% for a site that gets a lot of social traffic and has blog posts ranking well.

If that’s a normal range, the questions are what we can do to improve this, and also what happens if it’s higher?

• Legitimate reasons your bounce rate could be higher:
  • Different traffic sources have different bounce rates
    • You might get a lot of traffic from Facebook to blog posts. Facebook makes it easy for people to leave, so traffic from Facebook can skew your overall bounce rate, for example.
  • Different devices have different bounce rates. Mobile usually bounces significantly higher than desktop (as much as double, on sites with poor mobile usability).
  • Different content has different bounce rates
    • Homepage is people who are looking for your business. Should never have a high bounce rate
    • Service pages should have a reasonably low bounce rate for the same reason
    • Blog pages might have a higher bounce rate, even if they are useful, because visitors are coming for information and don’t necessarily have commercial intent.

So those are legitimate reasons your bounce rate might be high. What are some of the reasons that can be avoided? 

• Site speed. A slow loading site can kill your bounce rate. If you’re not getting a lot of blog traffic and you have a bounce rate of 60%, you have an issue. If you site has bounce rate of over 80% you have a big issue
• Layout and look & feel. Is the layout turning people off? “I came, I puked, I left” is the phrase used by one Google employee when asked to describe bounce rate. Is your site getting this reaction from visitors?
• Mobile friendliness, see above.
• Lack of a clear compelling headline or visual cues. When someone lands on the page do they know who this is for, what this is about and why it’s better than the alternatives?
• Sometimes Analytics is installed or tracking incorrectly.
  • Check using the Google Tag Assistant. This will show you if the code is installed correctly. If you have a REALLY low bounce rate (below 10%), it’s broken

How Can I Reduce My Bounce Rate?

• Improve website usability
  • Imagine people have their fingers hovering over the back button. We have to build a website that keeps them engaged and takes them closer to their goals
  • Get people to the information that they need as quickly as possible
  • This starts at navigation. We don’t want to overwhelm people with too many menu options, so aim for a maximum of 7 at once and give additional options as dropdowns or an Ubermenu.
  • Make every click easy and brainless. Don’t force visitors to use initiative, because clicking back is easier than using initiative.
  • Use internal links to take people to other content on your site quickly.
• Clarify your message and value proposition
  • Who is this for? What is it about? Why is it better? All of this needs to be obvious on every page of your website
  • Every page on your site has a goal. Make it prominent and SELL it. Make sure the most important thing is the most important thing: highly visible, utterly compelling and easy to do.
  • Even your blog posts have a goal. It will depend on the post, but each should have a call to action.
  • Give visitors a clear next step on every page. How can they move their relationship with you forward?

What Next?

If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review on iTunes.

If you’d like some free advice to reduce your bounce rate and generate more leads and sales from your website, then you’ll want to request a free website and marketing review from our expert Ninja Reviewers. There’s no catch and you’ll have your review within 3 working days!