You build a website and your unique products are thriving on your website for the world to see and buy. You are delighted that so many users are coming to your website but then they leave without any justification. Customer come and goes, but you do not understand why this is happening. Some of them only visit once and never return on your page. This is called as Bounce Rate; the higher it goes the higher is the demand that your website and marketing strategy needs a refurbishment.
There are overabundances of web analytics tools to measure everything from time spent on website to cost per engagement and often it leaves you astonished to drive a conclusion from plethora of data, but bounce rate is one of the metrics that cannot be ignored as it reasons how good is your website, its products or services and how much time user is spending on your website.
By definition,
An Exit Rate is generally a percentage of users who leave after viewing the page. It allows you to know when user left your website after viewing the specific page. The high exit rate is an alarm, which you should consider, as something is not connecting user to the products and services you are offering.
A Bounce Rate is generally the metric which shows that user left your website after visiting a single page. The each page on the website has its own bounce rate but you may have to consider these three pages in consideration:
Landing Pages
Pages where you want to have conversions into business
High Traffic pages which most of your visitors visit
The ways which postulates bounce rate are:
Hit the back button
Type a different URL
Close the window or TAB
Click on a external Link
TimeOut
How do you find Bounce Rate?
The analytic report on Google Analytics will provide the overall bounce rate with option to data mine bounce rate for individual pages. In Google Analytics, you can find this by going to:
Content -> Site Content-> Pages.
The tool box of your website addresses to bounce rates in variety of ways but some simpler ones are as follows:
Analytics: It helps in determining bounce rate and traffic sources for most popular pages.
User Testing: It derives what users are doing on your website.
User Surveys: You can ask the user what they want from your website and where it can be located on your website.
The most common factors of higher bounce rates are as follows:
The look and feel of your website is not attractive.
This is one of the top most factors of higher bounce rates. Your website should be appealing to the customers so that they spend time on your website. Great design creates credibility.
The website is difficult to use.
You are happy with the design and functionality of your website but users are not, they are often left confused, some pages are not opening or worse poor layout, poor information architecture, technical errors or malfunctioning of buttons and page errors leave them offended.
Your website doesn’t surpass user expectations.
User visit your website based on a promise, if you don’t offer the information they are looking for on a landing page, this prevent user motivation to dig down your website for the information they need, so it is crucial to remove hindrance causing the same.
Audience of your website is not correct.
Users often visit the websites on a promise based on your ad’s, newsletters or any other marketing campaigns, if people visiting your website finds out that it was a false promise so they are going to bounce nevertheless. In order to avoid this, please accurately frame your ad’s, news letters, brochures or your marketing campaigns.
No Call to Action
This issue comprises of lack of usability or navigation which increases the bounce rate. If user doesn’t know where to go next, the shopping cart cannot be found, or doesn’t know how to subscribe to your newsletter or blog, then it is a big problem.
