Photo by Patty O’Hearn Kickham
Do you know what’s a bounce rate? Do you know what’s yours?
The bounce rate is the number of people who landed on your webpage and did not either
- Click through to another page or
- Stay longer than 30 seconds
It shows your website’s ability to not only capture the attention of your prospective readers but also engages them. If you have an advertising campaign going on, it would show you how targeted the people you’re bringing in are.
This blog’s bounce rate, for example, is a great 28%. It averaged at about 39% just before I started writing articles for Thou Shall Blog and other websites plus a few well-known article directories like Ezine Articles. Therefore the readers I’m bringing in are likely to be more targeted than before.
How to keep bounce rates low?
Bringing in more targeted readers is but one way to keep bounce rates low. Here are a few more tips:
- Have no more than one purpose in a single page. This doesn’t quite apply to blogs. If you run a traditional website, make sure every page has one focus only. I’ve more quadrupled my client’s conversion rate (sales and opt-in) just by removing adsense from their squeeze and sales page. If you are running a blog, make it very clear what you want your readers to do. For example, in this blog, you’d know that my main purpose is to get people to sign up for my newsletter because that box is the most attention-drawing element on it.
- Make navigation easy by including a search box and a distinct navigation tab.
- Have a great design. It needn’t be anything fancy but your design have to easy on the eyes. For example, using white words on a black background is definitely a no-no. A big fancy header don’t normally improve your bounce rate but a great headline definitely would.
- Use images to capture attention and place your main message as a caption because captions are about 400% more likely to be read than your body copy.
- Track and test. If you don’t which design would do better, test out different versions. In the first few months of this blog, I changed the theme of this blog 7 times before settling on this one because it gave me the lowest bounce rate and the highest conversion.
It really is that easy. Try it out.
P.S. If you are just getting started with this bounce rate thing, check out the free Google Analytics. There more sophisticated tools out there but this does job all the same.
On the subject of using images to capture readers’ attention, you are really doing well in this department.
Do you use iStockphoto, buddy?
Yan
Yans last blog post..The Art of Writing Damn Good Blogs
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Nope I don’t. I use flickr because they are free and they look awesome!
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