The bounce rate is an indicator that can be scary!
In addition, Google Analytics collects a lot of data, which for most entrepreneurs is a bit confusing.
And you don’t have the time every day to understand and then analyze data from all the many dashboards on Google Analytics.
Here’s what to do about the bounce rate:
Most website owners think that a high bounce rate is a negative sign and a low bounce rate is a positive sign. In fact, this percentage can be misleading. It is better to follow its evolution and focus on the reasons that scare away your visitors.
When you see this percentage on Google Analytics, you’re looking to understand what’s wrong:
- Is your content on your company’s blog too difficult to understand?
- Are they addressed to the right audience?
- Is the design well suited, especially on mobile?
In this article, learn how to measure your bounce rate.
Then, I also share with you 7 quick ways to reduce your bounce rate.
But first, let’s define the notion of bounce rate and why you need to worry about it.
The bounce rate is an indicator that can be scary!
In addition, Google Analytics collects a lot of data, which for most entrepreneurs is a bit confusing.
And you don’t have the time every day to understand and then analyze data from all the many dashboards on Google Analytics.
In this article, learn how to measure your bounce rate.
Then, I also share with you 7 quick ways to reduce your bounce rate.
But first, let’s define the notion of bounce rate and why you need to worry about it.
What is the bounce rate?
Let’s start with a simple definition, even if it’s not entirely accurate:
A bounce is a session in which a visitor visits only one page of your website.
A bit like on a trampoline, the visitor arrives on a page of your website and leaves it as if bouncing back!
There is a bounce when, for example, your visitor:
- Press the “Back” button of his browser,
- Closes his browser,
- Click on an ad or an external link,
- Enter a new URL in your browser…
According to the Google Analytics Help Center, a bounce is a session that triggers only one query on the Analytics server.
In other words, a user visits a page (or article) of your business website and then leaves without having any other interaction on your website during the same session.
SEO experts call this “pogo-sticking”.
The calculation of the bounce rate
This is a binary definition of the bounce rate.
Indeed, let’s imagine that you land on this article on the bounce rate, you read it and then:
- You leave, it gives a bounce rate of 100%.
- You visit another page, and the bounce rate goes to 0%.
Here is the mathematical formula to calculate the bounce rate (source Neil Patel)
On the other hand, I don’t think that the bounce rate directly affects your ranking in search engine results pages.
This is because search engines do not have the value of the bounce rate for sites that do not have a Google Analytics account.
Therefore, using the bounce rate value in the algorithms would not be fair.
Anyway, even if the algorithm does not directly take into account the bounce rate, its meaning is very important.
Indeed, if a user arrives on a page of your website and immediately presses the “back” button of his browser, Google will deduce that there is an inconsistency between the search intent of the user and the content of your page.
And since Google is always looking to satisfy its users, it will say “maybe this page should not rank so well in my results”.
You now understand the importance of mastering the notion of “rebound”!
Clearly, this indicates whether your Content Marketing actions are effective and whether your visitors are interacting properly with your content.
Hence the challenge of understanding your “target” customers and then knowing how to properly analyze your bounce rate.
How to know your bounce rate on Analytics?
On Google Analytics, to find out the average bounce rate on your company’s website, go to:
Audience > Overview
This is the number of bounces on all your pages divided by the total number of visits to all these pages during the same period.
You can also see the bounce rate of a single or multiple pages in virtually every report in the section:
But also know your bounce rate by segmenting your visitors according to their age, gender, location … in the reports in the “Audience” section of Google Analytics.
What is the right value for a bounce rate?
Numerous studies reveal that the bounce rate varies according to:
- Your type of activity: B2B or B2C (source Brafton),
- Your sector of activity (source Digishuffle),
- The type of web page: product page, blog post…
- But also demographic criteria of your target: age, gender, country…
So the average rate of 58.18% calculated by Brafton above means nothing.
On the other hand, Google Analytics will help you optimize your bounce rate by enabling benchmarking.
To do this, go to Google Analytics in Administration > Account Settings.
Then, to find out how you position yourself in relation to your competitors, go to the section:
Audience > Channel > Benchmarking
Specify:
- Your sector of activity,
- Your location,
- The number of daily sessions.
And the table below compares the main performance of your site with your competitors. The bounce rate is present in the last column.
Ultimately, a “good” bounce rate is different for each website. It may even be different for each page of your site.
My advice: regularly follow the trend of your bounce rate and see how you can reduce it for your conversion pages.
This indicator should help you identify the weaknesses of your website, without setting you a percentage to reach.
Warning: a very low bounce rate often means that you have inserted the Google Analytics tracking code several times in your pages. Make sure you’re installing Google Analytics on your site.On the same topic: Tutorial: Google Analytics dashboards
Is a high bounce rate penalizing?
Not necessarily, says Google.
This is because some pages can naturally have a high bounce rate.
For example, a quality blog post can give the information you were looking for without your visitor needing to check out other pages.
Note: The bounce rate has no correlation with the time a user spends on a page.
It all depends on the goal you’ve set for your business website.
Let’s take 2 examples:
- If your goal is for your visitors to consume a lot of content, a high bounce rate is a negative sign.
- On the other hand, if your goal is to fill in a contact form on the page, a high bounce rate is not a problem. In this case, track your conversion rate instead.
Now, let’s see how to improve your bounce rates.
What are the main causes of a poor bounce rate?
Here are some of the most common causes that cause people to leave your website immediately:
- A title that does not correspond to the content of your content,
- Poor content that does not cover the topic thoroughly,
- Poor mobile compatibility,
- A loading time of your pages too slow,
- A popup window too intrusive,
- Too many invasive ads…
7 ways to reduce your bounce rate
If you feel the need to reduce your bounce rate and to save you time, here are 7 actions to take to retain users of your site.
1. Write content with your target audience in mind
If you generate a large volume of traffic but with a high bounce rate, it means that your visitors are not interested in your content.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that your content isn’t of good quality, but that you’re not targeting the right people.
Make sure you understand your target audience:
- Do you know their problems?
- Do you understand their needs?
- What questions do they ask and why?
- How can your products and services help meet their needs?
Publishing content on all these topics ensures that you attract the right people, those who will be your future customers.
To formalize the expectations of your target customers, use our persona templates.
If you feel the need to reduce your bounce rate and to save you time, here are 7 actions to take to retain users of your site.
1. Write content with your target audience in mind
If you generate a large volume of traffic but with a high bounce rate, it means that your visitors are not interested in your content.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that your content isn’t of good quality, but that you’re not targeting the right people.
Make sure you understand your target audience:
- Do you know their problems?
- Do you understand their needs?
- What questions do they ask and why?
- How can your products and services help meet their needs?
Publishing content on all these topics ensures that you attract the right people, those who will be your future customers.
To formalize the expectations of your target customers, use our persona templates.
Cornerstone articles are the pillar articles of your website.
They combine the main topics from different articles on your blog.
This is the name that yoast has chosen to identify important content, those that you want all your target visitors to consult, as Lycia Diaz specifies on La Webeuse.
How to choose your Cornerstone items?
To choose your cornerstone content, identify 5 or 6 articles that you want your visitors to read when they first arrive on your site.
These are your best articles: the most important, the most complete… In short, the ones you would like to see appear as a “sitelink” link.
In addition, make sure that your Cornerstone articles include the keywords you are looking to be referenced on first.
Then a Cornerstone article must:
- Be accessible directly from your home page,
- Contain links to your other articles that deal with similar topics but with more specific points. And vice versa. SEO experts talk about working on internal networking.
Finally, regularly update the content of your Cornerstone articles to keep it relevant.
Organize your site’s content as a hierarchy
At the very top are the cornerstones.
On #audreytips, you have a cornerstone article on Digital Marketing that describes the 6 levers that any entrepreneur has to conquer new customers.
My article on Digital Marketing points to 6 articles each describing the benefits of one of the levers, such as Natural Referencing.
This article points to articles related to the 3 areas of SEO: SEO On page, SEO Off page, technical SEO. Below, you will find many more advanced articles, such as the optimization of the meta description.
By structuring all your content well, your visitors will stay longer on your website and your bounce rate will decrease.
My advice: a Cornerstone article is usually substantial. So help your readers by inserting a table of contents.
3. Improve the readability of your content to decrease your bounce rate
You can publish the best available content on a given topic.
But, if the visitor can’t quickly browse it to verify that the content matches what they’re looking for, they’ll leave immediately.
To do this, work on the readability of your content to make it easily “consumable” with:
- An appropriate title and subtitles,
- Enumerations in the form of bulleted lists,
- Short sentences,
- And images, videos, slideshares… that add value to the content.
Also work with care:
- Your introduction which must be catchy,
- Your conclusion which is your second chance to convince Internet users, who have browsed your article quickly, to read it more carefully.
A readable and well-presented article decreases the bounce rate. A wall of hard-to-read text is off-putting.
All these recommendations are all the more true as Internet users consult more and more internet on their smartphone.
4. Add a call to action on your content
Without a call to action, your visitors don’t know what to do after reading your content.
So, make it clear to them what you want them to do next.
Without a call to action, they can obviously consult other pages, but why leave this to chance?
Here are 3 simple actions to take:
- Refer to a related article at the end of your articles,
- Add a Bonus to download in some of your articles,
- Include a pop-up form with Hellobar to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter…
Make sure your call to action is relevant to the content the visitor is reading.
Indeed, highlighting irrelevant offers will have the opposite effect: to scare away your visitors.
5. Make sure your page loads quickly
Human patience is a rare commodity.
If your page loads too slowly, you lose a significant part of your visitors before the end of the display of your page.
It doesn’t matter if the content matches exactly what your visitor is looking for, if they don’t load quickly, your bounce rate is very high.
This is even more important for users on their mobiles.
So optimize your website knowing that the main cause of slowness are images.
6. Avoid pop-ups
Yes, a well-designed pop-up window is one way to encourage people to interact.
But, there is a difference between a tasteful pop-up window and one that disrupts the reading of the content.
In one case, you convert a visitor into a prospect, in the other you scare them away.
Indeed, nothing is more frustrating than trying to read an article and see pop-ups or advertising inserts embedded above it.
So, be pragmatic when adding your popups and avoid creating a bad user experience for your visitors.
7. The ultimate: open your external links in a new tab
To optimize the natural referencing of your pages, it is important to work on your links with your other articles.
But, it is also important to create links to external content. The reference to other sites supports your remarks.
However, if possible, open your external links in a new window or tab.
Thus, you give your visitor the opportunity to easily return to your website to finish reading since the content is always present in a tab of his browser.
FAQ – 3 frequently asked questions about bounce rate
What is the bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only one page and triggered only one query to your Analytics account. For example, if a website’s homepage receives 1,000 visitors in a month and 500 of those visitors leave the site without visiting other pages, the homepage bounce rate is 50%.
What is a good bounce rate?
As a general rule, a bounce rate of between 26 and 40% is excellent. 41 to 55% is about the average. 56 to 70% is higher than average… But this percentage is not necessarily a bad sign. It all depends on the content of your website. For example, anything above 70% is worrisome unless you host a blog, a news site or events…
How to reduce your bounce rate?
Make an opinion on a good or bad rate according to your site and follow its evolution. Try to understand why visitors leave so early, Offer a better user experience. Make sure your website is readable on mobile. Use visuals and/or video to attract attention. Avoid overly intrusive pop-ups.
Conclusion on how to reduce your bounce rate
The bounce rate is an indicator of Google Analytics to follow, but without being obsessed with it.
Consider the bounce rate as a guide to estimating the interest that Internet users have in your content.
And follow its evolution trend without trying to reach an objective percentage since there is no ideal bounce rate.
To reduce your bounce rate, apply the following recipe:
- Have quality content useful for your visitors,
- Create hat articles,
- Work on the readability of your content,
- Optimize the loading time of your pages,
- Add a relevant call to action with your content,
- Avoid overly invasive pop-ups,
- And for perfectionists, set your external links to open in another tab…
Then, monitor more closely more important indicators such as conversion rate, turnover and/or number of leads.
Do you think your bounce rate is too high? What actions have you taken to reduce it?