Improving your websites performance using Bounce Rate as a metric

Have you ever tried to measure the performance of your website, but been scared off by all the different statistics, metrics and reports thrown at you? Then you obviously haven't looked hard enough at your bounce rate.

So what's this Bounce Rate all about?

Put simply a Bounce Rate is the percentage of single page visits. To be more precise, the percentage of web site visitors who left the site from the entry pages without clicking on any other links

What makes the Bounce Rate such an important performance metric of a website page is that it reveals the quality of incoming traffic and the effectiveness of the site template including page content.

How to track Bounce Rate

You can track a websites Bounce Rate using just about any analytical tools, the by far the most popular is Google Analytics

What is a good Bounce Rate?

Anything between 25% to 50% is diserable for most sties and anything over 60% should be cause for some concern. However, to be fair there are some situations where you would expect a high bounce rate, such as:

• Conversions from the landing page itself
• The user has bookmarked the page
• The user is specifically looking for information contained on that page
• The user clicks on your advertising

Investigating a high Bounce Rate

Traffic Referrals

Break up your report to illustrate the different traffic referrals your site gets and try to work out the top traffic referrals that drive poor quality traffic to your site.

Try to avoid poor quality traffic sources and invest more time building good relationships with quality referrals and expanding existing ones.

Visitor Expectation

Bounce rate is a great measure of visitor expectations. Work out what exactly made the visitors come to your website from each referral. These may include:

• Banners
• Search queries
• Links
• Emails

A few things to consider:

1. Visitors may have searched for terms that are too generic for your website. The landing pages may only satisfy a small percentage of those visitors, which will obviously increare your bounce rate.
2. Visitors may be clicking on an old promotional banner on a referral website. The promoted offer may no longer be valid or available.
3. You may be able to refine visitor expectations by treaking your content, meta tags, ad copy or newsletters.

Landing Page Quality

If the referrals you are receiving are relevant and visitor expectations match what you are offering, then you need to be looking at the quality of your landing pages. Some things you may wish to look at here include:

• A/B testing
• Heatmap tools
• Improving the quality of your content
• Increase site usablity

One last thing to consider

Avoid using the overall all Bounce Rate of your site as the key metric. Instead break up pages into groups of 2-4 and study them individually. Look at pages which have a lower bounce rate and determine why, you may be able to apply these factors to pages with a higher bounce rate.

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