Understanding Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who left your website/webpage from the entry point without doing any activity. Activity would mean clicks made & pages visited. High bounce rate indicates that the content presented or the way it was presented was not relevant to the entrance options.

Visitors landing on your entry page are considered to bounce if they:

• Close the window or an open tab

• Types a new URL

• Leave the site by clicking the BACK button

• Click a link on the page which takes them to a different site.

• Or the Session timeouts (generally taken as 30 mins)

Why everyone is looking for ways to lower Bounce Rate?

The answer is simple - The lower the bounce rate, higher the possibility of visitor browsing your website pages and converting.

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

"It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, and 50% (above) is worrying."

Now, the bigger question is - How to control the Bounce Rate?

• Content - The content available on your website is the major factor for bounce rate. If the content is relevant to the visitors expectations the chances are that they will not bounce from your website without visiting other sections of website. For E.g. if your website is about IT Conferences and on landing page you are talking about general stuff and not educating the visitors on the benefits of attending your conferences, then visitors are more likely to leave your website due to lack of desired information.

• Website Load Time - Try to reduce the website load time - It's really hard to find patient visitors. Instead of using heavy animations on the complete page which takes lot of time to load, use animation only in the banner area and present text content in remaining part of the page. This will make user read the content and in the mean time your animation will also load.

• Flow - Provide your visitors with proper entry points to find their way. Do proper linking to the internal pages that guide them to their areas of interest. Most of the visitors bounce because they were not able to navigate to relevant pages. Make your navigation flow user friendly by categorizing and sub-categorizing.

• Above the fold - All your important information has to be placed 'above the fold'. This includes your 'call to action buttons'. 'Above the fold' is that part of the website which you see without a scroll. Research states that 60% - 80% of visitors will not scroll your website 'down the fold', so the best opportunity is lying 'above the fold'.

• Popups - No one likes Popups, especially when then appear as an unwanted guest. They are the biggest distraction, when a visitor is looking for some important information. Even the feedback popup, sometimes annoys the visitors and they bounce.

The above mentioned points can definitely help you reduce your website bounce rate

We at AfterTheNet - The Web Strategy Company follow the above mentioned keyword strategy to supplement our clients with the most basic to the most advanced techniques for any goal they decide to reach with their website. Our step wise approach gives them the complete visibility of their website - which they are deprived of very often, in absence of a trustworthy resource.