Blahblahblah. Numbers, links, keywords, bounce rate, etc. What the freak does all this gobbledygook mean?
If you have a web site, blog or online storefront, you will have some kind of analytics tracking everything about everything of your visitors. They mean many, many things and contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a geek to decrypt it all.
Let me elaborate to one particular item in your analytics that has some importance – bounce rate.
You know when you are bouncing a ball in the air and you want to make it go higher? In this case, you want your bounce rate lower.
Allow me to shed some light on the subject:
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that enter your site on a certain page and don’t visit any other pages on your site. Basically, if I visit a blog post I read, but only read that post and leave, that counts as a bounce to that site.
How Can a Visitor Bounce?
On your site, that particular landing page could be all the information or none of the information that visitor was looking for. Mostly this type of traffic may come from search engine results or links posts in places like Twitter.
See? Not too hard to figure out, right?
Here are a few ways that a visitor to your site could bounce after hitting that first landing page:
- Closing the window or tab after reading the first page.
- Clicking the famous back button on their browser
- Entering a new URL into their browser and navigating away from your page.
- Bouncing via a session timeout. When a visitor leaves their browser on that page for over 30 minutes, it will turn into a bounce.
Basically, it is your job to prevent your bounce rate from reaching a high percentage in you analytic reports.
What is a Bad Bounce Rate?
So now that you have an understanding of bounce rate, what would be considered a bad rate?
When you look at your web report, you should take care to look at both the page and site bounce rate. Here are the measurements of bounce rate:
- 0 – 20% bounce rate is ideal
- With a bounce rate of 30% or more should cause you to look closer at those pages.
- A bounce rate of 50% or more is something you should look at fixing as soon as you possibly can.
Why Would Someone Bounce?
There are many reasons a visitor would bounce from your site.
Let’s see..hmm. Shiny things in the corner, looking out their window and SQUIRREL!
Sorry, back to what I was talking about…oh yes..bounce rate.
On sites that are mostly informational, a high bounce rate may not always be a bad thing. When someone just wants to find specific information, some will not want to go deeper into the site after they have already found what they are looking for.
Your site could be out of the niche or subject that visitor is searching for. You may post something on creativity, which your visitor searches for, but your site is based on a broader subject your visitor might not want to read about.
Another reason could be design and user experience. If you have a site that is very busy and hard to read and follow, they will not stick around. One thing to always look at is how well does your site flow. You should also look at how well your navigation is to read and flows to other pages. Also, make sure to keep the ads to a minimum.
Where to Go From Here
So, as you can see, you don’t have to be a number crunching geek to know about bounce rate.
I was going to go into some ways to decrease bounce rate and other things about analytics, but I have rambled wayyy too much in this post and you will just have to wait for my next post on ways to decrease bounce rate while learning how to stop getting distracted by shiny things. Mmm…shiny things…
So, do you know what your bounce rate is?
What do you use to lower your bounce rate?
Photo credit: jot.punkt
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