What happens when you try to open a webpage that takes forever to load? Or when you come across a website that is hard to navigate? You will just close that tab and search for other sites, like many people do. Now imagine that is your website which people are abandoning and that simply explains what bounce rate is.
If you are a website owner, you will understand the feeling that comes when the bounce rate is high. The reality is that you will have a bad feeling when it is high and exciting when it’s low. Every website owner understands the impact it has on conversions.
To make you understand better, we linked up with our expert and seasoned author, Alex Lysak, (you can link up with him here) who will elaborate on how to measure, assess, and audit to increase conversions.
Is a High Bounce Rate that Bad?
The bounce rate statistics is something you should pay close attention to if you are someone who cares about reputation and your website’s performance on the internet space.
But how high is high. Is there a criteria used to arrive at the figures, or everything is robotic? You need to understand better how the figures come before you tense about the statistics you see.
If you keep getting a low rate, you also need to understand how that happens to avoid getting shocked one day when you find high figures in your google analytics.
What is Bounce Rate?
It is a way of measuring the percentage of people who visit your website, and instead of clicking on the tab menu and other links, they leave. Precisely, users bounce if they fail to engage with the page they have visited.
Additionally, the rate can also be a tool for measuring the quality of your website. You will realize if your website solves the visitors’ problems or it doesn’t. From there, you will know whether your page needs some improvement from its current state or not.
Let us take, for instance, you are looking for a site such as Scanteam that reviews iGaming platforms. You need to spend as little time as possible on that review website so that you can click on the links and land on the iGaming platform. You thus need a platform with a low bounce rate so that you can finally land at the iGaming website with good reviews.
How does google analytics find bounce rate?
When a visitor visits your page in a single session that is a bounce. Therefore to calculate the rate, you have to consider the single session. You need to know if the visitor triggered any requests to the analytics server or not.
Here is what Google does
It calculates the rate by taking a single-page session and dividing it by all sessions on your page. Alternatively, it divides all page sessions by the percentage of all sessions in which users viewed only a single session to determine the average bounce rate.
Types of bounce rates you need to know when calculating
You need to consider various bounce rates when you want to know how to calculate bounce rate. Below are some of them;
Site-wide Bounce rate – refers to the total number of bounces across all pages over specific dates. The number comes by dividing the total number of bounces by the number of entrances across all pages.
Page-level Bounce rate – refers to the total number of bounces on a page divided by all entrances under the same date period.
Segment Bounce rate – refers to the sum of all bounces across all pages divided by the sum of all pages in that particular segment.
What are the key determinants of the Bounce rate on your website?
Specific reasons cause low or high rates on your site. Below are some of them. Consider them keenly and assess how they apply to your website.
Call to Actions
Most of the time, people believe that CTAs are only essential in driving sales on eCommerce platforms. However, that’s not the case. They are also useful on websites that don’t focus on sales.
You can use CTAs to link content that is available in other parts of your site. They are impactful since they will make your site visitors read at least all the content on your page.
Your CTAs must be relevant to the content on your site. That way, you will prompt your site visitors to click on the links, thus triggering your google analytics.
However, if the CTA you are using is not compelling, the chances are that no one will click on it. Your website will remain dormant all through, thus making the bounce rate higher than what you expect.
Websites’ loading speed
Speed matters a lot in every aspect of life. Let’s consider the below instance;
Imagine being in a hurry, then you opt to pick a cab to your destination. While on the way, you realize it’s taking too long because the engine power does not support the speed you want. You end up disappointed and swear not to pick the cab or a similar one again.
That’s how disappointing it is in the case of a website.
When visitors visit your website, the time they take to reach your landing page matters a lot. If they take a lot of time, they will not wish to click on anything because they will be aware of the speed.
On the other hand, when your website loads faster, the users will be interested in clicking other tabs on the page. They will be sure that it won’t take them long to reach the content they want.
Also, Google will take note of your website’s loading speed. Mostly, loading speed is also a determinant of your ranking. If it loads faster, it will rank higher compared to when it loads slowly.
How to Audit your bounce rate?
After receiving the figures over a certain period, you may want to conduct an in-depth audit to understand how it works. Below are some of the things you can consider if you’re going to audit your bounce rate.
Use the dates
The first thing you can do to succeed with your audit is using your Google analytics report over a specific period. From there, you can consider checking on each segment to find out if you made any changes on particular dates.
Benchmarking
A better way of doing your bounce rate audit is making comparisons against other websites in the industry. Through that, you will easily distinguish your weak points and work on them. Doing that will also enable you to know what they are doing to make them excel.
You will know how to find out what is a good bounce rate and a bad one from the audit.
From the above, you can realize how your website bounce statistics are significant in showing you the direction your website is heading to. You can also try applying the concepts discussed above.
Author
Alex Lysak is the CEO of ScanTeam. I have been working in online marketing since 2011, my main areas of expertise are marketing research, social media marketing, and SEO. During 9 years of experience, I have helped many products and startups to develop marketing strategies and to implement them further.