Bounce Rate

Introduction

New era internet world is flooded with countless number of websites and web pages. If you use Google or any other search engine to search a particular key word or key phrase, you will get relevant results (SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimized writing affects the results of the webpages displayed by the search engine). Then you generally click one of the first few web pages. Once after the website is loaded you will seek the content you want. If you get the relevant information you are likely to stick with the website and dig deeper into it. In case you don’t find the proper content you will leave the page and try some other website. This is the phenomenon where the term “Bounce Rate” originates from. Bounce Rate is a term related to web traffic analysis and is defined as the ratio of total number of website visits with just one click to the total number of website visits.

What is the significance of Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate of a website gives information about the performance and quality of content of the website. If the bounce rate of a website is high, it means that most of the users visiting the page flee away to different websites after seeing the landing page and do not opt to open other web pages of that particular website.  If a website has a bounce rate of 50%, it means that the content of the website is satisfactory and one in every two users sticks to that website.  If the bounce rate of a website is more than 65%, it means that the website is really good and the contents provided are very relevant and satisfactory. On the other hand if the bounce rate of a website is less than 35%, some serious reformation needs to be done.  It is very obvious that every website owner will want the bounce rate to be as low as possible. It is certainly not possible to keep all the visitors interested in a website but still low bounce rate is what a website owner aspires for. The average bounce rate differs according to the type of the web page. For example, in case of blog pages the bounce ratio is high because blogs are many times not interrelated and once the users have viewed the contents of a blog page the migrate to other pages because other blogs of the same page may be uninteresting or out of context for the user. In case of websites for product selling the hit ratio is low because of the obvious reason that if you want to buy a product you will want to check out the whole range of that particular product thereby clicking more links on the page.

Reasons of high Bounce Rate

Once a user opens a web page he/she can migrate to other websites by

·        Opening different websites by clicking their links

·        Choosing to close the window/tab of that particular page

·        Using “back” button

·        Typing a different website address (URL)

There can be many reasons due to which a user switches to different websites, the most obvious one being poor content of the web page. If the users don’t find any relevant material they will obviously leave the page at once. One more thing to be kept in mind is that all the pages of a website must be satisfactory because in many cases the user will land on page other than the homepage and if the landing page is not satisfactory the user will bounce to other website. In this case your homepage won’t even come into picture. If your web page takes too long to open the visitors may opt to go for another page without even seeing the contents.  If the landing web page is spammed with advertisements and pop-ups, it is likely to create a negative impression on the user.

How to bring Bounce Rate down

It is pretty evident that a website owner will like to keep the bounce rate as low as possible. In order to do that it must be ensured that the contents of the web pages are clear, relevant and satisfactory. All the web pages must be equally worked on because anyone of them can be the landing page. Proper and easy navigation should be provided with responsive layout and ads must not exceed a standard limit. Some plug-ins can be used to boost the loading of the web pages.

Summary

Google analytics bounce rate data is a key parameter in determining the performance of a website. The website owners will obviously want to keep the bounce rate down so that all the resources that have been invested during creation of their web pages don’t go waste.