How to Improve Bounce Rate

Google Analytics provides various valuable information about your site. One of which is “bounce rate”. Bounce rate can indicate whether your traffic is “high quality” and engaging with your site or not. After all, even though you have massive traffic coming to your site, but no one does anything, it won’t really help your business. In this article, I will discuss how to improve bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate

In Google Analytics, a bounce is “calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”

Bounce Rate is a rate that people come in your page and leave the same page without any engagement (e.g., click the link that takes them to another page). So if you see your bounce rate is 60%, then 60% of the people who came to your page leave after they only view the page they landed on. In other words, 40% of people clicked the link to go to another page.

Is High Bounce Rate Bad?

It is not necessarily bad if you have high bounce rate. Some of your articles may be just to give information. If that’s the purpose of the page, the high bounce rate would be expected. But how do we know if the page gave satisfaction to the visitors? In that case, you can check the average time on page to see how long they stayed on the page. It would depend on the length of your content, but if the average time on page is more than a few minutes, you can rest assured that you have delivered the quality content, and even more, so that it sends a strong signal to Google that your content is highly relevant to the search engine query.

Check Bounce Rate for Individual Pages

When you open up Google Analytics, if you haven’t customized your dashboard, you should be able to see the bounce rate right at the homepage. However, it is a summary of the bounce rate, and it will be a little difficult to judge your site is doing well or not just based on the summary of the bounce rate. As I mentioned above, some pages may have high bounce rate, but that’s ok. So you will want to find each page’s performance.

If you look at the left navigation, you will find five reports. Bounce rate is categorized as visitors’ behavior so that you will click the Reports “Behavior”.

From behavior, look for Site Content and click it to expand.

You will see All pages. Then you will see the list of pages that visitors viewed, and you can see information about visitors’ behaviors including average time on page and bounce rate. It is sorted by the pageviews, but you can sort by Bourne rate from high to low to find which page has high rate.

* All report shown are from Demo site of Google store, so the data is based on the e-commerce.

So how to improve Bounce Rate?

If you see your page that you intended visitors to engage (click on the sales page or sign up for the newsletter) and have high bounce rate, you will have to consider improving your page. Here are some suggestions:

Is your website Easy to navigate?

You want your visitors to explore your website, so they know who you are. Make sure your website is easy to navigate. Many people tend to go to “about me” to find out about you or your website, so make sure "About me" is visible.

High-Quality Content

If your content is not relevant or resonating to visitors, they will quickly leave your page. Review your content to make sure it delivers valuable information, is resonating to visitors. Also, make sure your content is not salesey, but still inviting people to click on the button or links.

Add more Internal Links

Having internal links is one of the essential strategies for SEO. It will make your site more authoritative. Your readers may find your website the same way. Adding more internal link will keep engaging your visitors.

Find out which source creates high bounce rate

Another thing you want to find out is where visitors who bounce come from. It is especially helpful if you have external link connected to your site or advertisement going on. To find out, go to Acquisition report, then from All Traffic, go to Source/Medium.

From the report, click comparison report

And from the dropbox of the right column (compared to site average), chose bounce rate.

From this report below, you can see Google/CPC is not doing too well compared to other sources.

So you may need to revisit your CPC and make sure that CPC traffic is landing on the valuable and relevant page to these visitors.

Improve Site Speed

Loading time is one of the ranking factors, so it is something you will need to focus on for SEO purposes. Some visitors may leave your site if it takes too long to upload. To check your speed, you can go PageSpeed Insights and many other testing sites, but Wealthy Affiliate also provides PageSpeed Insights within its platform if you are premium members. From Site Manager, click “details” and click “check”. It will run and scan, and you will see how well the speed is.

Conclusion

Google Analytics brings you various helpful information. One of them is Bounce Rate. Bounce rate measures how your visitors engaged with your site such as clicking to another page or to the sales page. It can be beneficial if you want to see if your page had sent visitors to the sales page or merchandise’ site.

I have shown you how to look into bounce rate of individual pages as each page has different purposes. Some may have high bounce rate, but it is ok if the page is only to provide valuable information. If you want to check if the page serves that purpose, you can check the average time on page to see how long your visitors stayed.

For pages that are to lead visitors to another pages or sites, I suggested a few tips on how to improve bounce rate if it is high. Some of them are to make easy navigation, have high-quality contents and add more internal links.

I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions or other ideas on how to improve bounce rate, please leave the comment below.