You’re using Google Analytics. But do you ever think what does the Bounce Rate mean in Google Analytics? What is bounce rate? What is an average bounce rate? What is a normal bounce rate for a website? Or, is a high bounce rate a bad for your site?
Bounce rate is the percentage of your website’s visitors who didn’t stick around and bounced off after viewing the page where they landed. A ‘bounce’ (often called a single-page session) happens when a user lands on a website page and exits without triggering another request to the Google Analytics server.
According to the Google support, “bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”
For example, if any visitor enter your homepage from a search, browses and scrolls around, but doesn’t click on any internal links or interact in any other meaningful way and then leaves, they have ‘bounced’ from your homepage.
How is the bounce rate calculated?
The bounce rate of your website is calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on the site. The bounce rate checker, Google Analytics calculates your site-wide as well as single page bounce rates, using Rb = (Tv/Te) formula.
Think, if there are 100 visitors enter on your website (total sessions) and 5 of them exit without clicking any other link or page, then your website’s bounce rate is 5%.
How to reduce bounce rate?
When you see you the bounce rate is more on your website, that’s mean users of your site have less interest about your contents. You have to reduce the amount of bounce rate to catch your visitors. And to reducing bounce rate, you have to well decorated your site. Let’s know some way how you can reduce for your site and get the expected audience.
1. Make your website speedy
Speed is an important issue of your website. If you see your website load slowly then you have to think about your traffic. There is know any person who loves a website load slowly. This is so important when factoring into your bounce rate. If your site is slow a user might start loading a page on your site, and if they get tired of waiting, they hit back and try the next one. So, you have to fix the speed problem your website first!
Use quality hosting for your website. If your site is based on WordPress, use lite theme to make it. A lite theme always load fast. Try to optimize your contents. Never use excessive image those you don’t need.
- Use fast hosting service.
- Never use third party low quality hosting
- Choose lite theme for your site that load fast
- Reduce use of excessive image
Always keep in mind, websites that load slower have high bounce rates and consequently lower conversion rates. So, don’t miss any scope to make your site fast.
2. Make your site mobile friendly
Most of the people forget to make their website mobile friendly. But it’s true that the large amount of visitors of your website come from mobile. According to Google more than half of the overall web traffic comes from mobile, and 53% of these visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
So it’s so much important to make your site friendly for mobile phone users. Make sure your website works flawlessly on mobile devices! Improve your website design for both media devices like PC, laptop, tab and mobile phone. Don’t ignore a single thing like this as they can contribute strongly to your bounce rate.
3. Improve navigation menu
If you don’t have a well decorated navigation on your website the visitor has no reason to stay after visiting that first page. It will most likely result in a bounce. Make your site navigation menu easy to use and not difficult to find any content. You need to make sure that a person can easily navigate your site to find what they are looking for.
You can use the important navigation menu on your site header, sidebar and footer also. A user always have the interest on a website where he can find everything easily. So, make sure
- You have clear navigation menu
- They are easy to use
- You don’t use too much dropdown menu
- Easy to find the contents you have
4. Improve your website design
The design of your website does matter. An eye-catching website always liked by the users. Everything including your site navigation, layout, colors, font style, and font size everything should add to your user experience, UX. Because, if it fails, your visitors are likely to bounce off.
Your content and design needs to be attractive to hopefully target better the audience you’re aiming for. People don’t spend time on sites that look horrible or are not easy to navigate.
If you are running your website on a popular CMS like WordPress that are thousands of premium themes you can invest in to get you up and going for under $60. Not every business needs a totally custom design to be successful.
5. Stop using excessive popups
Advertisements are horrible and boring, right? Sometime popups are act like the ads. No one wants annoying popups. Specially when they happen as soon as your visitors get on your website. In 2013, 70% of people thought irrelevant popups were annoying. The good old controversy of whether you should use popups or not on your website. Use popups where your really need.
6. Make external links open in new tab
If you have any external links in your contents, make sure they will open in a new tab. If someone click on them and they will open in a same time, that’s mean you lost the user. There are a little possibility to coming back the user on your site again.
So, force your visitors to open links in the same tab creates back button fatigue for them. This means your visitors will go to a new page every time they click on a link and then click the back button to return to the page they were. This decreases your page views.
Is a high bounce rate a bad for your site?
High Bounce rate is bad or not, it depends on situations. If the success of your site depends on users viewing more than one page, then, yes, a high bounce rate is bad. For example, if your home page is the gateway to the rest of your site (e.g., news articles, product pages, your checkout process) and a high percentage of users are viewing only your home page, then you don’t want a high bounce rate.
Too low and too high are certainly unwanted spots when it comes to where your bounce rate should be. On average maintaining a lower bounce rate is an essential part of your SEO. Normally, your bounce rate should be between 26% – 70%. On average you should maintain between 41% – 55%. However, if you could lower it down to 26% – 40% that’s excellent for your website.
Conclusion
In this article, we have answered what is a Google Analytics bounce rate and how it is calculated. we have tried to discuss how you should and should not interpret your bounce rate.
As you can there are a lot of ways you can work on to reduce bounce rate to your website and hopefully that will also result in higher quality traffic and more conversions, as they both go hand in hand. Do you have any other good ways to reduce bounce rate that we might have missed? If so we would love to hear about them below.
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