Post date: Dec 21, 2010 1:20:24 PM
If you have a website you should be taking an interest in theamount and quality of traffic that is hitting your site. Youspend energy, time, marketing efforts and money for thisvaluable traffic. Do you know what your bounce rate is?Bounce rate is referred to when a visitor comes to your siteand then leaves before visiting any other pages within thesite or doesn't stay for very long. This means they eitherdid not find something interesting to keep them there, orthey did not find a reason to click on any other page orarticle within your site. This means you spent the moneygetting someone to your site and they left with only aslight impression of your brand.It is one of the important factors used to analyze yourwebsite traffic, visit quality, goals and conversion rate.It is just the percentage of the single-page visits in whichthe person left your site from the entrance page. If thisrate is too high then it indicates that the entrance pagesfor visitors are not relevant to visitors. One way that can
reduce your bounce rate; you can provide your audience high
quality content which should relevant with your landing
pages. Here are some ways that can improve your bounce rate;
Your website should load faster; it will definitely attract
your audience. Do not use heavy website designs that reduce
your website efficiency.
You should maintain a good balance between load time and
web page design. Load time of a web page definitely attracts
more user attention as compared to heavy pages which take
longer time to load. You can increase your website speed by
using following techniques. Page Speed is an open source
add-on. It enables web developers to compression images,
find ideas about improving page speed by compressing CSS and
JavaScript code. Webmaster Tools gives you with a website
performance graph under Dashboard- Labs - Site Performance.
It is used to analyze your website load time speed over the
past few months. Ensure your website is optimized for
related search queries.
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with the list of queries
people are using worldwide to reach your website. The list of
search queries would be increasing over time based on your
site authority and search terms people type-in to reach your
site. A heat map is a visual chart used to analyze where most
people look when they open your web site. By having a heat
map, you can re-organize your existing websites to meet the
information needs of your target audience. Heat maps also
used to analyze high performance vs. poor performance areas
on a landing page. Google Analytics offer incredible
statistics about your website traffic. This tool also
enables you to analyze entry, exit pages, unique page views
and various other useful metrics. I often see many people
confuse between bounce rate and Exit Ratio.
However, the exit ratio is the percentage of exits from a
page to the total number of visits to that page. One more
ratio is confused with bounce rate; single page visit ratio
is a percentage of single page visits over total visits to a
page. Single Page Visit Ratio;Single Page Visits to the page/
Total Visits to the page Exit Ratio; Total Exists from the
page/Total Visits on the page or Total Exits from the
page/Total Page Views of the page Bounce Rate; Single Page
Visits to the page/Total Entries to the site through that
page.
The average bounce rate falls between 18 - 30%. Any web page
with a bounce rate higher than 30% should be looked at
closely. Following are some of the numbers that were listed
by Steve Jackson based on his experience with various sites.
Website Bounce Rate Retail sites driving 20-40% Simple
landing pages 70-90% Content websites 40-60% Portals like
MSN, Yahoo groups etc. 10-30% Service sites 10-30% Lead
generation 30-50%.
You should find out what your bounce rate is. Use Google
Analytics to get this information right away. The second
step is to create something on your site that will motivate
the viewer to stay, shop, or better yet give you their
contact information. A common method is to offer something
of value to the viewer for free if they will tell you a
little bit about themselves. Normally this is a downloadable
document of some kind in exchange for their name and email.
My recommendation is to make sure this free information is
VERY valuable. Yes. Give some of your most valuable
information for FREE.
If I am interested in your product or service and you offer
me very valuable information at no cost I am much more
likely to engage with you further and pay you for something
else that you are offering. Another helpful method is the
utilization of a video with a very interesting title and
content. Entice me to click on the play button and hear what
you have to say. This video needs to be very valuable,
informative and engaging. After the viewer has seen your
video they need to know more about you and what you can do
for them. They should trust you more after they view the
video. Test, test, test... Try different free products,
different videos and so on. You will find that different
strategies work better on specific markets or lead sources.
Once you have discovered which strategy works best for each
of your lead sources, accommodate those leads by presenting
them with the form of media and type of information that
seems to best suit them. Bounce rate is very important in
determining the future of your marketing and web development
strategies. Continually monitoring this very important metric
can save very valuable resources by helping you to detect
early success or failure of particular marketing strategies
related to each lead source.
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