How To Decrease Your Bounce Rate

Decreasing your bounce rate is different for every website, but you can compare it to the competition's averages and apply a few different strategies yourself to improve it dramatically.

What Is A Bounce Rate?

Before we talk about how to decrease your “bounce rate”, do you know what it is? It's defined as a representation of the percentage of visitors who enter your site and leave the site (bounce) rather than continue viewing your other pages.

How Do You Measure Bounce Rate?

If you have a website or blog, than keeping track of your analytics should be part of your regular routine to make sure your site/blog is preforming at a high level. To see your bounce rate, use Google Analytics.

When you set up an account with them, you will be able to go inside and see the statistics of your site. Your bounce rate will be one of the first things you see when you login to Google Analytics.

Some Background Info And Averages

If your bounce rate isn't too great, it usually means at least one of two things:

1. The webpage was too difficult to use. (Layout wasn't user-friendly)

2. The visitor didn't find what they were looking for.

To know if your bounce rate is good or bad, is a personal preference for your site, but you can also look at industry averages to see how you compare to others, based on the type of site you have.

The data below illustrates the industry averages for the different sites based on Google Analytics benchmarks.

Google Benchmark Averages For Bounce Rate:

Content Websites: 40-60%

Lead Generation: 30-50%

Blogs: 70-98%

Retail Sites: 20-40%

Service Sites: 10-30%

Landing Pages: 70-90%

As you can see, blogs and landing pages tend to have higher bounce rates than sites for retail companies or services.

But, just because you may have a site that fits into averages, doesn't mean you should always settle for averages. Although I wouldn't get too caught up in bounce rate statistics, I think it is still a good indicator of how you can improve your site or traffic.

15 Ways To Decrease Your Bounce Rate

1. Avoid using annoying pop up ads. If you do them right, the can help you get more leads and sales, but most of the time, they will just annoy your viewers.

2. Make your site easily navigable. Don't make it hard for people to find what they're looking for on your site or they will leave.

3. Use a good layout and keep your site clean. Everything should look organized and be user-friendly for a better experience. It's all about the visitors.

4. Make your site as fast as possible. Measure this using Pingdom or Quick Sprout. You'll even get tips on how to improve what is slowing it down.

5. Make external links open in separate windows, so users don't always have to click the back button.

6. Provide the highest quality content possible. If you just ramble on or don't give your readers what they're looking for, you will pay for it.

7. Make your website mobile-friendly. Over 17% of readers find your website through their smart phone these days.

8. Cut out distractions that keep readers from focusing on content. Too many ads, crazy backgrounds, popups, etc. can distract people and increase bounce rates.

9. Don't make users have to search for your search box. If people want to find something on your site, have your search box visible and ready. many themes will have it towards the top by the header.

10. Have clear calls to action. Make it obvious what the page is for and what you want people to do when they're there.

11. Drive higher quality traffic. If you are driving PPC traffic to a page on your website or something, make sure it is very targeted, high quality traffic that will actually want to be on that page you send them to.

12. Keep your content readable. Giant paragraphs intimidate people these days. Split them up into 1 or 2 sentences per paragraph and it will look cleaner and easier to scan for viewers.

13. Don't make your posts too long. People don't have great attention spans these days (just like me) and they may just leave if they see that your post looks like a book.

14. Use media on pages and posts. People are visual people. People don't want to just want to read all the time anymore, they want pictures and videos to capture their attention. Break up text with media.

15. Have good meta descriptions for people who see your content in search engines, so they know exactly what the post is about before clicking on it.

Conclusion For Decreasing Your Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is basically an indicator of how good the user experience is for your site. Although it is a flawed statistic because you can't always control exactly who sees your pages and posts, especially when you start ranking in search engines.

Just think about how you would want sites to be if you were the viewer. You can also model after your favorite sites and top competitors in the same niche as you to compare layouts and user-experience.

If you make your site fast, user-friendly, and get very targeted traffic, your bounce rates will dramatically improve regardless.