How To Decrease Bounce Rate

One of the most important metrics us bloggers have to take note of is the bounce rate.

Note: If you haven’t been tracking your users, you should start now. Not doing so means you’re “flying blind”. Google Analytics is free and awesome. You can get it at http://www.google.com/analytics.

What is Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate tells us how many people who arrive at your website “bounce” out to another site. That means they didn’t click through to another page in your site or they didn’t stay on the current page long enough (30 seconds for Google Analytics).

Photo by Roddy

What Does it Mean?

High bounce rate means you’re not doing a very good job at grabbing attention and compelling visitors to stay. I’m sure you know what that means - you’re going to have an awfully low conversions if nobody is even reading you what you wrote.

And it generally means one or more of 3 things:

1. Your headline is poor.

2. Your website look horrible at first glance.

3. Your website takes forever to load.

How To Decrease Bounce Rate

To decrease your bounce rate, you’ll first have to understand your vistor’s psychology.

We are all very impatient, very busy people. We want to get what we want as quickly as possible. So what we do is we tend to thin-slice. We judge a book by its cover. In that split second of landing on a page, we make numerous judgments about what we see.

Bad cover = bad content.

Admit it. You do that too.

So if you want to decrease your bounce rate and get people to stay and read, you must “put your best feet forward” and quickly hook them in. Some things you can do right away - like making sure your website loads quickly - to decrease your bounce rate while other things - like crafting a compelling headline - requires a little research.

Research is the only way you can find out what captures the attention of your readers, what makes them stay and what went wrong.

Here’s an example. How do you know if the high bounce rate is because you’re driving the wrong kind of traffic (untargeted prospects), or you’re using the wrong headline for highly qualified prospects? How do you know which is the underlying problem?

Research and Test.

P.S. One of the most common question I get is, how much is too high? Generally a bounce rate less than 50% is considered ok. I think you should only compare bounce rate to yourself. If you have improved over time, that’s great. There’s no need to worry about specific numbers. This blog has a bounce rate of 45%, which have improved from an awful 82% since July.

P.P.S There’s a free wordpress plugin that can cosmetically but drastically improve you bounce rate. I put it here in the P.S. because it doesn’t correct the underlying problem. You can find out more about it here, number 9 on the list.

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