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The evil bounce rate
July 13th, 2008A lot of webmasters look at their bounce rate, realize how crappy it is but aren’t really sure what to do with it and how to analyse it. First of all, let’s define the bounce rate with Wikipedia’s help:
It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
So let’s define bounce rate as the percentage of users who leave your site from the first page they visited. Not giving a damn about your bounce rate is a really good way to loose money and potential readers. Let’s say all your readers only visit one page (100% bounce rate) and you manage to get all these visitors to visit 2 pages instead, you double your page views but also double your advertisers exposure. What does this mean? More money. First, what’s a bad bounce rate? It all depends of the niche. For certain niche, a bad bounce rate might be 70% and on another niche it might be 40%. I’d say when you start going over 60%, there are some improvements you can make.
So how to fight that evil bounce rate?
To fight your bounce rate, you have to know your traffic. There are certain types of traffic that will kill your bounce rate (StumbleUpon) and you can’t do anything about it, it’s the type of traffic. For this article, let’s presume your traffic is mostly organic. What I usually do to improve my bounce rate is to put my girlfriend or a friend in front of the most popular page of my website and ask them why would you stay on my website and why would you leave? This is a terribly good technique because you can’t yourself evaluate objectively your website.
Get their comments and work on it!
Usually, the main comment is that there’s nothing catching their attention. Remember that someone leaving from the first page is someone who actually didn’t even read half of the first page. So, before concentrating on the second page, concentrate on the first page! Getting your readers’ attention is the first step and this will ensure they actually read the first page.
Right, but how do I get their attention?
Visitors are usually very attracted by colors and images. How painful is it to get on a colorless webpage filled with text? That leads me to one of the first solution: Your website design. Remember that for every single visitor coming to your website for the first time, your website is like any other. If on top of that your website’s template is a common template found on over a thousands blog, your website is really unattractive. No matter how good your content is, it still is a regular blog for any visitor. So why not work on your template a little bit? Change some colors, make yourself a little logo, etc. It doesn’t have to be terribly good, just a little bit different. If you are no web programmer/designer and you can afford a 50$-75$ template, do it! This will make your site a lot more distinctive and professional. My last experiment with getting a professional template improved my bounce rate of about 10%. Just because it looks more professional and unique!
Another solution I’ve used is to redirect your readers to some other related articles. Make yourself a section “Related Articles” or “You might also like” and place some related articles in there. If you use a CMS like Wordpress there are some good plugins to help you achieve that.
People also like to read what’s popular. Why not have a section in your sidebar or where ever on your site called “Top articles”, “Top pages”, “Most commented”, “Most popular” or anything like that?
Make sure these sections are visible to your visitors and it should really improve your bounce rate.
One other thing I like to use are ads referring to my own site. On certain important pages, I like to put my own little banner which is referencing another page on my website. If the banner is attractive, it works like magic.
So there you go, with these little tips you should be able to improve your bounce rate.
4 Responses to “The evil bounce rate”
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Amazing I was not at all aware of that. you are right that the most important thing is theme and color which are used in website becuase if it looks attrativce then everyone will visit it and like to stay longer though content is not unquie. Everybody like good and attractive thing, ya uniqueness is there but that is secondary.
Great idea Ben I appreciate your efforts.
Like this post also and bookmarked here http://choicefreedom.stumbleupon.com/
Hey no problems, thanks for your comment!
[...] that evil bounce rate, always fighting to improve it! Yesterday, I changed the template of my other blog for a much more [...]
This is good insight to bounce rates. Out of curiosity, what is the bounce rate on this site?
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