Bounce rate is a metric that is tracked by Google Analytics. It measures the amount of people who land on your website and then immediately jump straight back off. When you’re paying for SEO or paid ads to drive traffic to your site, the last thing you want is a high bounce rate, as it means the eyes you are driving are not sticking around long enough to learn whether your product or service is of interest to them.
In order to keep as much of your traffic as possible, there are a few tasks you should perform to reduce your bounce rate. This article will explore some of these.
Setting Up Analytics
If you haven’t already set up Google Analytics, this is your first step to tracking bounce rate. It will allow you to see if the tasks you are performing are having an impact on the rate. Luckily, Google offers a free mini-course in setting up and using analytics.
Once you have your analytics set up, you will see your bounce rate as a percentage of your entire traffic and also the average time people are staying on your website in seconds. Any bounce rate above 56% is considered a little on the high side, and you should be exploring the reasons for this.
How Can I Improve My Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate can be attributed to many different factors, but some of the main ones are listed here.
Non-Responsive Website:
If your website uses a design that is nonresponsive (meaning it doesn’t automatically respond and resize depending on the device a person is using to browse) this can create a bad user experience and cause people to click away from your site.
Your website should both look and perform well on mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop devices to ensure that your user experience is great no matter how they are browsing. Go through your site on multiple devices, check that everything displays well, the buttons are easily clickable, and the flow of the site is simple to follow to get to where you want to be.
If you are not happy with your current website, you could find white label development services that can design and develop a creative, unique website that is multi-device responsive as well.
Slow Websites:
Even if your site looks and performs well on multiple devices, it may still load slowly. Slow websites are a huge reason why bounce rates increase, and therefore it is important that you take action to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible (ideally in 3-4 seconds.)
The speed of a website can be impacted by a number of factors including slow hosting and cache issues. And as explained by ALT Agency, images which are too large is a reason for a slow website.
You should spend time addressing factors which could slow down your website in order to decrease your bounce rate, and if you’re struggling to make these changes yourself, you can always hire a professional agency to do so.
Spending time making changes to your website will decrease your bounce rate and give your traffic more time to peruse your site and hopefully purchase your product or services, so it is definitely a worthwhile business activity.