Find out why people are leaving your site and what to do about it

Have you ever spent weeks (or even months) designing a landing page for your website? You made sure to get buy-in from all of the key stakeholders and worked endlessly with your dev and QA team to get everything running properly. You’re excited to start tracking the progress your new landing page has been able to contribute to your overall marketing strategy until you log onto your web analytics platform to see that over 70% of the people who get there leave without making a single click. What gives?! Luckily you’re not alone and this metric – known as bounce rate – is easy to track and gain actionable insights from to help improve your landing page and your visitors’ overall experience.

(Kaushik, 2010) Bounce rate is known as “the percentage of sessions on your website with only one page view.” This means that visitors made absolutely no engagement with that page and immediately hit the back arrow in their search browser to start their search all over again. If this number is extremely high (over 50%), that’s a warning sign that this page needs a little extra work in order to entice visitors to engage with your site and hopefully turn them into customers.

Now that you know what your bounce rate is, what can you do to lower it? Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity, outlines a few steps you can take right away after measuring your bounce rate. (Kaushik, 2010) You can take bounce rate one step further and measure the bounce rate for both your paid and organic keywords. This will ensure that you’re not bidding on keywords that aren’t relevant to what your website has to offer or maybe your landing pages just need updated. (Kaushik, 2010) You can also improve your website’s performance by looking at the bounce rate of pages that get the most traffic. At the end of the day, search engines end up deciding what your site’s home page is so if you’re able to improve the pages that search engines draw your visitors to the most, you’ll end up seeing a huge jump in ROI.

Some of you may be thinking, “Is bounce rate even relevant to me? I run a blog or a nonprofit website that doesn’t measure conversions like an e-commerce site does.” (Aslanyan, 2016) The argument can be made that you produce content for people to read it, they don’t have to click anywhere on your site for you to see that as a valuable visit (you just can’t track if they actually read it or not) and that you can also track how many leads you’ve received and that can be a better indication if you’re meeting your marketing goals. The only problem with this theory is that it allows for too much interpretation and starts to put assumptions into your findings. If the goal of your content is to drive visitors somewhere else through a link - that’s not considered a bounce. (Kaushik, 2010) Even when they click on an advertisement from one of your advertising partners, that’s considered a click on your page and can potentially lower your bounce rate. Whenever assumptions have to be made on whether someone took action or not, that’s usually an indication that the metric is something you can’t change so it’s better to focus your efforts where you can make changes.

Measuring bounce rate on your website provides clear and easy to understand data as well as actionable insights you can take right away. Taking a look at your paid and organic keywords, re-designing your site to make it more user-friendly and improving the bounce rate for the top landing pages in your site all can help lower your bounce rate and increase your brand’s ROI.

Aslanyan, L. (2016). Calm down! Bounce rate is not that important. Wapost. Retrieved January 22, 2018 from https://blog.waypostmarketing.com/calm-down-bounce-rate-is-not-that-important

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing Inc.