Your website’s bounce rate represents the number of visitors (in percent) to your website who leave your website prior to visiting a second page. Some web analytics software will also log visits under a certain length of time as a bounce. If you land on this blog’s homepage for example and the post titles don’t sound like something you’d like to read, you might leave without reading any of the posts — you would be registered as a “bounce” on web analytics software. Why web developers should care about their bounce rate suddenly becomes obvious — if visitors are leaving your site without clicking on any other pages, that means you’re likely not providing them with what they were looking for when they initially found (or returned to) your website. Improving your website’s bounce rate isn’t as easy as most other metrics — by the very definition of bounce rate, bounced visitors aren’t going to visit your contact information page and send you an email about what they would have liked to have seen on your website. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to convert visitors into sales or not — any web developer’s goal should be to keep visitors on his site as long as possible or necessary for conversion. Every additional page visited is one more chance to convert that visitor into a sale, one more chance that the visitor might click that Adsense ad, one more chance to have your message be heard.

Bounce Rate SEO

Google is ever so secretive about their ranking factors, however many SEOs believe the bounce rate, or more specifically, your bounce rate relative to that of other sites in your niche, may be a ranking factor — possibly even a significant ranking factor. Does it not make sense? If your website is providing content that visitors are looking for, you shouldn’t have a 100% bounce rate.  One unfortunate limitation of bounce rates is that they’re not necessarily a good measure of how interested visitors are in your content. As said previously, it’s a fairly safe to assume a 100% bounce rate on search engine traffic for a particular keyphrase implies that the website didn’t have the keyword connotation visitors were looking for, but what it’s not always that simple. We don’t know how search engines may be logging bounces, however many web analytics programs use a session timeout of 30 minutes — a visitor who doesn’t visit a second page on your website within 30 minutes will register as a bounce just as they would had they left your website by clicking a link to a different website, entered a different website into the address bar, closed their web browser window/tab, etc. One problem with measuring a bounce rate using such a low session timeout is that if someone writes a very long post, it’s quite possible you wouldn’t have had a chance to finish reading it within 30 minutes — you might have been jotting down notes as you read it or read it a second time with the end result that you were on the page for longer than 30 minutes. One obvious solution to this that I’ve implement on this blog is to have post summaries on the homepage instead of full posts — the bounce rate was almost 100% when I was displaying five 2000+ word posts on the homepage. For most websites, the homepage receives the most page views and hence, is an important place to begin optimizing your site to reduce the bounce rate. Be careful not to optimize your site for search engines so much that it detracts from user experience.

Monitoring Bounce Rates

There are various programs out there to monitor bounce rate,  such as Google Analytics.  Don’t just focus on bounce rates however — focus on getting visitors on your website to view more pages. My average visitor so far this month has viewed 5.07 pages per visit to the site, compared with 4.27 pages per visit in May — they’re viewing almost 1 page more on average and I would like to think some of the changes I’ve made above are part of the reason for it.  Found below are a few suggestions on making your website more user friendly and encouraging more page views.

Reducing the Bounce Rate

1. Site Navigation — If visitors aren’t able to find pages that interest them, they’re not going to visit other pages — take broken links as an extreme example of eliminating the possibility of viewing a page.  I added a popular posts section and added the posts which my web analytics software has told me have gotten the most page views (presumably the pages visitors have found most useful). In my case, the posts listed in my popular post section are also responsible for the overwhelming majority of my search engine traffic, so naturally I would want to link them to my homepage and give them a bit more link juice than other pages. Recently, I added the Yet Another Related Post Plugin — a Wordpress plugin that displays posts which a mathematical algorithm has determined are most related to other posts, giving visitors some likely good posts to read next. I also have the SEO Smart Links plugin which creates links out of certain words I’ve indicated I would like to be linked to certain threads. You do have to watch this one a bit and it has gone a little crazy creating 3 links in one post for “domain development”, despite having checked off an option on the plugin that it display links for a keyword/keyphrase at most once.

2. Site Aesthetics –  As mentioned in my recent article on first impressions, people do judge websites by how they look. I designed a new header for this site to make the free Wordpress theme it’s using not look like a free Wordpress theme. I got rid of the navigation bar, the second sidebar, and changed the background from being completely white to being grey outside the 960px wide theme (only visible if using a browser window wider than 960 pixels). I changed the default h1 tag color from blue to green and changed the size of h2 tag content. Using the space saved by getting rid of the second sidebar, I made the post area wider — originally 500px, the post area is now 720px, meaning 44% more content is written on each line and hence, less scrolling is needed to view content. I got rid of unnecessary links, such as the author link previously present in each post, I changed comments from being no-follow links to non-link text to encourage spammers to find another website to spam and to encourage genuine discussion rather than 1 sentence comments hoping to get some free traffic. I got rid of the footer — will probably bring it back, however I won’t be bringing back the footer links to Wordpress and the theme author’s website (I paid for the right to remove the footer links). I also plan on adding more images to posts in the future so there’s not so much white space. and to change the design of sidebar elements, removing the last visible indicator that this site uses a free Wordpress theme. When visually improving your website, be mindful of those with slower Internet connections and how long it may take them to download a multi-megabyte homepage. If a website doesn’t load within 10 seconds, I’ll usually go back to Google and search for another similar website, unless I’ve been to this website before and know it has content I’m interested in. Despite you having a 30″ widescreen monitor, remember that some of your visitors don’t, so try and make content suitable for those with smaller, lower resolution monitors. Nobody likes having to do a lot of scrolling, especially horizontally.

3. Post titles and post excerpts that make visitors want to read more — Contrary to what some people would tell you, a post title really doesn’t need to be anything witty/controversial. Yes, a title like I had awhile back of “Are you that ####ing stupid?” is sure to be clicked, however that’s not exactly something you can do everyday, plus, it really isn’t necessary. If you know what kind of things your readers will be interested in, then you should know how to write titles that will interest them. A simple post title such as “Using Escrow.com” is a perfect title to describe what visitors will find in a post about Escrow.com — visitors to my site have at the very least heard of Escrow.com and know it’s an online escrow service which can be used to safely buy and sell both tangible and intangible goods, such as domain names. There’s no need to further explain what the post contains because my site audience knows beforehand what the post will be about. If this weren’t a blog about domain names and domain development and were instead, say, a blog about safely using the Internet, a better post title might be “How To Safely Make Online Purchases”.

4. Increase Visitor Interaction — Writing controversial posts isn’t the only way to get visitors to stick around and possibly leave a comment. Ask visitors a question at the end of a post such as “What do you guys think?” Domainers have been talking a lot recently about call to action domains; are your posts calling you visitors to take action? What action do you want your visitors to take? What can you do to make more of your visitors take this action? Domain development is a quite popular topic in the domain name world at the moment — it only makes sense to throw in a few domain development posts on a domain name blog or do like me and completely shift your blog over into that direction.

Bounce Rates and Conversions

The biggest flaw with web analytics traffic metrics is what I’ve criticized social network reported traffic statistics about in the past — they list numbers such as page views, unique visitors, registered members. Let’s think about this for 1 second. If I have a forum with 10,000 members but only 500 have visited the site within the past 90 days, do I have 10,000 or 500 members? Clearly, I only have 500 active members — the only statistic that actually matters. Page Views — Without further information, I have no way to know the distribution of page views — were 1000 visitors responsible for 100 page views each or were 20,000 visitors responsible for 5 page views each? Which would be more preferable? Unique visitors — of what use are they if they bounce immediately upon visiting? Saying a site has 10,000 unique visitors is like saying 10,000 people entered a particular shopping mall today. As a retail store, would you want more visitors or more sales? The goal is obviously to convert more visitors into sales and hence one would want more visitors because they represent more potential sales, however if given the option to solely choose between having more visitors who will not buy your products and less visitors who will… Most advertisers are utterly clueless about this, so if you want to make money off your blog from advertisers, by all means submit your article to Digg and hopefully you’ll get several thousand 100% untargeted uniques. You’ll have a great Alexa rank but you won’t have any more sales. The users who are most likely to be valuable to you and/or advertisers are first of all repeat visitors and secondly, search engine referred visitors for keywords and keyphrases which match the content of your site. If someone visits your site every day and only visits 1 or 2 pages because they’ve already read all your other content, that’s not a bad thing and should be distinguished from first time website visitors quickly leaving your website upon their first arrival. As great as a low bounce rate is, the ultimate goal is a low bounce rate from visitors who might convert into sales — putting a scantily clad woman as an image on this site so people click on it to enlarge the image will surely result in a lower bounce rate with the Digg crowd, however it’s still useless traffic — useless traffic that is now wasting a whole lot more of my bandwidth. Conversely, a high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing if your content matches up so well with the products your advertisers/Adsense are offering that they immediately head over to consider buying them. When analyzing your website’s bounce rate, it’s important that you look at the bounce rate on individual pages and not only the overall bounce rate of your website.

Going back to the Digg example, it’s very likely that the bounce rate on Digg traffic will be much higher than your site’s average, so if you get a lot of traffic from Digg because an article on your website made the Digg front page, then it’ll pull up your entire site’s bounce rate — obviously the problem here (if we want to call it a problem) would be the bounce rate on this one individual page, not that of the rest of the site. Furthermore, because we know Digg traffic is of much lower quality than the traffic normally coming to our website, we know there’s not really a problem at all and the end result was to be expected. Once you’ve discounted any obvious reasons for a high bounce rate, is there any other reason why a particular page has a higher bounce rate than others? Taking the Digg example one step further — you could analyze bounce rates from traffic originating from different sources on different pages. If search engine traffic is bouncing, it’s probably because they’re not finding on your website what they were looking for. With other websites linking to your content, you’ll get a lot of curiosity clicks, especially if the website linking to you isn’t in the same niche as your website. Even if the website linking to you is in your niche, unless other content on your site is similar to what’s being linked to, chances are these visitors will bounce. If the traffic this page receives is a reasonably large amount, you’ll want to do something about it — it might be worth looking into further improving site navigation, linking to more articles, or creating and linking to additional articles similar to the popular article with a high bounce rate.

Exit Rates

Unlike bounces, we can’t prevent exits — everyone will eventually leave a website, whether it’s to view a different website, because they turned their computer off, their Internet disconnected, etc. While we can’t prevent exits, we can however carefully monitor the exit rate of particular pages to see which pages aren’t performing as well as they should be. Think of the exit rate as the bounce rate on any particular page, treating each page as if it were the first page visited. Depending on where you receive the majority of your traffic from, exit rates may possibly be more important than bounce rates. Exit rates after the first page viewed may be an even better indicator of whether visitors are finding what they’re looking for than bounce rates. If a visitor was interested enough in learning more about bounce rates to click on this post’s title and view the article, they were clearly interested in reading about bounce rates. Suppose I were to split this article into 2 parts on bounce rates  — if most visitors exit after reading the first part, I know that visitors probably didn’t find the information they were hoping to find or didn’t find enough valuable information to justify spending any more time reading about bounce rates on my site.

Suppose I made a sitemap which linked to all the categories of my website and then each of these categories linked to the posts in their respective categories. If someone were to exit after clicking one of the category links, it would mean they were clearly interested in one of the topics they thought I had on my site but when they saw the content, nothing interested them. Are your titles descriptive enough of the content to be found? Are there any important topics in that category which you haven’t yet covered (hint: look at the keywords and keyphrases bringing you search engine traffic)? If you have a product page with an extremely high bounce rate, chances are visitors aren’t interested in your products or you’re not doing a good enough job selling visitors on why they should buy your product and how it will be of use to them.

One more thing to think about is whether you actually want to provide your visitors with as much value as possible. If these bounces or exits are converting into clicks or sales, you might want to see what you can do to increase the bounce rate and exit rate. Suppose I had a domain name ebook for sale on this site and every couple days you see me give away a few pages of content for free. Would this make you more or less inclined to buy the ebook? If you like the content being provided on the site, it might reassure you that the content in the ebook is worth paying for, however if I give out too much content for free, you might wonder why you’d bother paying and might as well just wait until I give out all the content in the ebook for free. A second example.. Suppose you run a web hosting review website — chances are your goal is to convert visitors into customers of the web hosts you review so that you can earn an affiliate commission. If your reviews aren’t detailed enough and you don’t cover enough web hosts, visitors might choose to visit a second or third website before deciding which web host to go with and you’ve lost your opportunity to convert them into a sale. On the other hand, if your reviews are extremely detailed and you’ve done so for 1000 other web hosting companies, customers are going to spend all day going through your pages looking at all the other web hosting companies and most likely taking a whole lot longer before deciding on a web hosting company to go with than they would have had less information and choices been presented. There’s a fine line between encouraging visitors to return so you can have new opportunities to convert them to sales and providing so much value to visitors that they don’t have time or see a need for anything more than you’re already giving them for free and perhaps won’t even see a need to return at all.

Related posts:

1. Increasing Page Views
2. Website Cleansing
3. Link Building