Improve Your Clients’ Bounce Rates – What You Need to Know

Are any of your clients seeing a lot of web traffic, but little action? In other words, are people coming to their site but not going to another page or taking any action such as signing up for a newsletter, buying a product or even just clicking a link? Time to check the bounce rate.

Generally speaking, this measures how many times people visit a single page on your site and do nothing more before leaving – bouncing from – your site. It is one way to measure engagement.

If your client has a high bounce rate, users are just visiting a page and leaving. If it’s low, users are clicking links on the landing page and going on to other areas of the site.

In its simplest form, here’s how you calculate it:

Bounce Rate = Single-Page Visits (Bounces) ÷ Total Visits

It’s also possible to measure for your entire site, channel grouping or source/medium pairs (traffic origin and general category such as organic search).

When Is Bounce Rate Too High?

Like many things in marketing (and in life), it depends. The averages vary by industry and purpose of the site.

Are a lot of people landing on your client’s home page but not continuing to view their products and services pages, blog posts or anything else on their site? Is their site unsuccessful unless they get users off the home page and motivate them to take action such as buying products?

Ecommerce sites rely on users going to various pages to check out and buy products. If they are to be successful, they need a low bounce rate.

On the other hand, some companies have websites where they expect single page sessions. For example, a site may be a blog where the latest post is right there on the landing page. You might also expect high bounce rates on news sites where people go to look up something specific then leave after they have read what they were looking for. Google explains that in cases like these, this isn’t really bad.

But what percentage is “high?”

According to Semrush,

• 56% to 70% is high. (Though as already indicated, there could be a reason for a high bounce rate.)
• 41% to 55% is average
• Optimal would be 26% to 40%

Distinguish from Exit Rate

We would be derelict if we didn’t point out the difference between bounce rate and exit rate.

• Bounce rate measures how often users leave your site without first going to another page. They bounce and don’t continue on the site.
• Exit rate measures the percentage of visitors who exit a specific page. They have visited other pages already. But the last page they visit is the exit page, and that is where the measurement is taken. The user has visited other pages of content and then at some point leave from the exit page.

Steps You Can Take

As with anything in marketing, before you can improve bounce rate, you need to analyze it. Google suggests analyzing bounce rate from different perspectives.

You can use Google Analytics (though there are other tools). Google Analytics provides you with

• An audience overview report
• A channels report
• An all traffic report for each source/medium pair
• An all pages report for individual pages

There are tweaks you can make no matter what kind of bounce issue you are having. For example, using high-value keywords good meta descriptions and compelling calls to action are always important.  But to get more specific, ask yourself the following questions.

Is There a Problem with the Whole Site?

If you don’t like the overall bounce rate, examine whether the site’s bounce rate is high across the board or if the numbers are skewed by very high bounce rates from a few pages, a channel or specific source/medium pairs. Once you know the cause of the high overall bounce rate, you can begin to address it.

If you have a high bounce rate problem across most of a client’s site, check

• Site design
• Content relevance and writing quality
• Graphics
• Color scheme
• Calls to action
• Prominence of important page elements such as search
• Load time
• Pop-up ads – Get rid of them if you have them.
• External links – You may need to reduce them or at least have them open in new windows.

Google’s Optimize can help you test and optimize a client’s website.

Are Just a Few Pages the Issue?

If the site overall has a good bounce rate but it is high on a few pages, check to see if the marketing you are using to drive people to those pages is in sync with the pages’ actual content.

Then consider, once a user reaches those pages, are you guiding them? Have you obviously mapped out to the user the next steps you would like them to take?

Is One of Your Channels the Problem?

If one of your channels has a markedly higher bounce rate than the others, maybe the channel information driving people to the site is not relevant to the content that’s on the site. In other words, if you have an ad about matte lipstick and all the pages on the landing page are glossy, your audience is going to bounce.

Umbrella Can Help

Bounce rate is one important metric among many others. And as you can see, whether or not it’s high or in a good range depends on a lot of factors.

If optimizing websites is not already one of your core offerings, you don’t have to hire staff or dive into a whole new area. If you need help with SEO and optimizing your clients’ websites, consider reselling Umbrella’s white label website design and SEO services. Outsource to experts while you focus on your agency’s core business. Call us for a free consultation.