Reduce Bounce Rates: Ready to Fix Your Conversion Problem?

Conversion Sciences

Technically, a “bounce” is a visitor that looks at only one page, or a visitor that spends an embarrassingly short time on the page. Keep reading to find out how to reduce bounce rates. A bounce is any visit for which the visitor only looks at one page and does not interact with it. This sounds truly unfair as someone may spend minutes on your blog post or landing page, and still be counted as a bounce. A visitor bounces when they don’t find anything close to what they were looking for when they visit your site. Either you’re attracting the wrong visitors or you don’t know why they are visiting. Bounce is the most extreme form of conversion problem. High bounce rates are an indication that you are throwing good marketing dollars down the tubes. Whatever you’re spending to get traffic to your site is being wasted. How to Reduce Bounce Rates or the heartbreak of “bounce” Boing! That’s the sound of someone finding your site, but not finding what they wanted ON your site. Boing! That’s the sound of website content that doesn’t match your marketing. Boing! That’s the sound of a website that talks about the company instead of the visitors’ problems. Bounces Aren't Helpful to Businesses What are some strategies to reduce bounce rate? This is a common question, and requires an understanding of the definitions of bounce rate. The bounce rate is a bit slippery and requires some examination. The intention of measuring the bounce rate is to figure out how many of your visitors are leaving almost immediately after arriving at your site. This metric provides for a lot of error in interpretation. "A high bounce rate means your site is crappy." This is rarely the case. A more accurate explanation is that your site doesn’t look the way your visitors expect it to look. Understanding what your visitors expect is the way to reduce bounce rates. Instead, there are usually some more valid reasons for your high bounce rate. Here are the things digital marketing and conversion experts examine when confronted with uncomfortably high bounce rates. 1. You're measuring it wrong How you measure your bounce rate can give you very different insights. For example, blogs often have high bounce rates. Does this mean that visitors don’t like the blog? Many analytics packages measure a bounce as a visit, or session, that includes only one page on your site. Visitors who take the time to read an entire article would be considered a “bounce” if they then left, even though they are clearly engaged. We set a timer for our blog traffic, so that any visitor who sticks around for 15 seconds or more is not considered a bounce. You can set a timer to the amount of time you consider appropriate. 2. How to Reduce Bounce Rates: Diagnose Technical Difficulties We are fond of saying that you don’t have one website, you have ten or twenty or thirty. Each device, each browser, each screen-size delivers a different experience to the visitor. If your website is broken on one of the devices popular with your visitors, you will see a bump in overall bounce rate. If your pages load slowly, especially on mobile devices, you can expect a higher bounce rate. Broken internal links and 404 pages are also cause for bounce. If your page breaks out in a chorus of Also Sprach Zarathustra when the page loads, you may enjoy a higher bounce rate. /wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Kevin_MacLeod_-_Richard_Strauss_Also_Sprach_Zarathustra.mp3 #top .hr.hr-invisible.av-158c1xv-0f3fff04d92ea45ef949f5320848a2c0{ height:5px; } How to diagnose device-related technical problems Your analytics package will track the kind of device your visitors are coming on. Is there a problem with this site when viewed with the Safari (in app) browser? The Google Analytics report Audience > Technology > Browser & OS shows that there may be a technical issue with Safari visitors coming from within an app. This may also reflect visitors coming from mob...