Dominik Parajka, 11. March 2021
In the beginning it’s necessary to answer the question what bounce rate actually is and why it’s relevant to pay attention to it. Bounce rate represents an important metric. However, the term “bounce” is in no way related to the time spent on the website. A bounce occurs when the visitor comes to a page of your website (product, contact page, homepage, blog article...) and leaves it after a certain time without browsing other pages or performing a conversion. It doesn’t matter whether they have spent 3 seconds or 5 minutes at the page. Bounce rate is subsequently defined as the percentage of visitors who have visited only one page of your website and left.
For example: if your homepage is visited by 1,000 people per day while 500 of them leave without a conversion or visit to other sub-pages the bounce rate will be at the level of 50%.
Bounce rate will give you a clue about how well your website or e-shop are able to attract customers and sell them your product. At the same time it also represents an important SEO factor. A high bounce rate can negatively impact the position of your website in search engines. What does it imply? You should also start dealing with the decrease of the bounce rate.
What level of bounce rate already represents an issue?
A certain bounce rate is a normal thing that you can’t ever completely avoid. However, you should be able to distinguish what level of bounce rate is still okay and which one is a sign of an issue.
Bounce rate is closely intertwined with the conversion rate as well. It expresses what percentage of website visitors performs the expected action (buys a product, fills in a questionnaire, registers etc.). A scenario can occur in which you’ll have a good conversion rate despite an increased bounce rate. It’s often caused by the fact that customers leave the website after the initial analysis of the product or price and come back later to find out additional data or to perform a purchase. Therefore, never look exclusively at bounce rate, butnotice the conversion rate as well.
The average rate of bounces depends in particular on the type of the website. A large e-shop with tens of sub-pages will have a different average bounce rate than a simple website with a registration form. According to hotjar.com analysts the bounce rate in the case of the respective types of websites should be within the range of the following figures.
- E-commerce websites: 20 - 45%
- B2B websites: 25 - 55%
- Lead generating websites (e.g. websites featuring product information): 30 - 55%
- Content websites (magazine article, “About us” section etc.): 35 - 60%
- Landing page (e.g. Websites with a registration form): 60 - 90%
- Blogs, portals, dictionaries: 65 - 90%
The bounce rate will be shown in almost all commonly used analytical tools such as Google Analytics. If the bounce rate of your website is higher than the normal average it can be a signal that somewhere there is an issue.
Reveal the cause of high bounce rate
Many factors can cause an increased bounce rate - from slow loading time of the website, wrong UX and UI optimisation all the way to insufficient capture of the visitor’s attention. Toreveal the potential issues at your website you can use one of the modern analytical tools.
Heat maps: this tool will highlight the locations on the website which are the most clicked by the visitors in colour. According to acquired data you can then optimise the layout of respective elements.
Scroll maps: will show you when and where the visitors scroll. Based on them you can for example find out that many customers don’t even scroll down. In such case it’snecessary to think about whether the first displayed data on the website are interesting enough to motivate the customer to find out more information.
Session recording: you can record the actions of respective visitors from their arrival to the website to their departure. The output comes in the form of a screen recording and you’ll clearly see how the visitors move within the website, where they click or which elements confuse them.
Questionnaire: there is nothing more direct than acquiring feedback in the form of a questionnaire. A simple questionnaire concerning customer experience related to your website can be incorporated directly into a location on your website, ordering process or e-mail.
4 tips to decrease bounce rate
Thanks to the use of the mentioned tools and the subsequent analysis we can reveal which elements of your website would need an improvement. However, most often it’s necessary to work on the following four aspects.
1. Increasing the web’s loading speed. A website’s slow loading time can very often bethe cause of visitor departure even before they actually manage to get to know your product or service. In today’s fast age nobody has time to wait several seconds until the website loads. Optimising the size of graphic elements, editing the website’s code or changing the hosting provider itself will help accelerate the loading time.
2. Right promotion targeting. Ads can bring thousands of new visitors to your website. However, if the promotion isn’t targeted at the right groups of people, your website will be visited by many people who won’t be interested in the particular product or service. We often witness situations when the ad doesn’t correspond with the content of the website to which it refers. Alternatively, it doesn’t represent the products or services in a right and comprehensible way. Due to this fact visitors immediately leaveand not only increase the bounce rate, but at the same time decrease the conversion rate and make your ads inefficient.
3. Optimisation of UX and UI elements. Optimisation of “User Experience” and “User Interface” lies primarily in the correct layout of the website’s elements. The website should attract the attention of a visitor in the course of the first 2 - 3 seconds otherwisethere is a big chance that they’ll leave. Make sure that the first information and imagesat the website attract the attention of the visitors. The right layout of “call to action” buttons, menu items, the layout of text and colour also represent a part of UX and UI. Particular web adjustments should come from a thorough analysis of input data acquired from heat maps or questionnaires. The efficiency of adjustments must be subsequently tested and evaluated. Therefore, it’s often a long-term process whose
result, however, is an improvement of the conversion rate and decrease of the bounce rate.
4. Inspiring visitors to further interact. Try to interconnect respective pages of the website and motivate visitors to visit them. A good example could be represented by links from blog articles - not only for products or services but also for other related articles on the blog. Whereas on product pages you can add recommendations for similar items from your e-shop. Other inspirations to action also include various limited offers or highlighted special offers. These adjustments won’t only decrease thebounce rate they’ll increase the conversion rate as well.