Tips to reduce bounce rates

April 19, 2021 |
By ydnewstag

Do you want to know how to make your website’s bounce rate lower? Bounce rates that are too high may harm your conversion rates. After all, your company may not expand if your site visitors leave before you have a chance to turn them into subscribers or customers.

We show you three tried-and-true methods for lowering your bounce rate and increasing conversions in this article.

What is a Bounce Rate? 

A single-page session on your website is referred to as a bounce. A bounce is described in Analytics as a session that only sends one request to the Analytics server, such as when a user visits one page on your site and then leaves without sending any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.

The percentage of all sessions on your site in which users visited just one page and caused only one request to the Analytics server is the bounce rate, which is single-page sessions separated by all sessions. Since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would allow Analytics to measure the length of the session, these single-page sessions have a session duration of zero seconds.

Is Having a High Bounce Rate a Bad Thing?

Yes, a high bounce rate is bad if the site’s performance depends on visitors visiting more than one page. For example, if your home page serves as a portal to the rest of your site (e.g., news reports, category pages, and your checkout page), you don’t want a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate, on the other hand, is perfectly natural if you have a single-page site, such as a blog, or provide other types of content where single-page sessions are required.

Lower Your Bounce Rate

When looking to lower your bounce rate, you should take a look at the issue from a number of different perspectives in order to deal with the problem in the most efficient manner. Some perspectives to look at are:

  • You can look at the audience overview report as this provides the overall bounce rate for your website.
  • By looking at the all pages report, you can acquire the bounce rate for individual pages.
  • The channels report provides you with the bounce rate for each channel grouping that you have.
  • By consulting the all traffic report, you can find the bounce rate for each source or medium pair.

If your average bounce rate is high, you can investigate further to see if it’s uniformly high or whether it’s due to one or two channels, source/medium pairs, or only a few sites. Examine whether the content fits well with the messaging you use to push users to those pages and if those pages provide users with clear paths to the next steps you want them to take, for example, if just a few pages are the issue.

If a specific channel has a high bounce rate, examine your marketing efforts for that specific channel: if users arriving via display are bouncing, make sure your ads are relevant to the content of your site.

If the issue is more common, check your tracking code implementation to ensure that all of the required pages are tagged and that they are tagged correctly. You may also want to rethink your site’s overall design, paying attention to the vocabulary, visuals, color, calls to action, and visibility of key page elements.

How to Find the Bounce Rate of Your Website

It’s a good idea to see where your site stands in terms of bounce rate before finding out how to lower it so you know where to make the changes we suggest.

This can be accomplished in one of two ways:

  • Simple and Fast Method: View in your WordPress dashboard with an insight tool.
  • Method 2: Look for it in your Google Analytics account.

First, we’ll teach you how to do it quickly and easily.

You can find all the data you need in your WordPress dashboard once you’ve properly set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site with any insight tool. Sign in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Insights » Reports to see your site’s bounce rate. The average bounce rate of your site can be found in the Overview Report.

If you need more details, go to the Publishers tab and look at your site’s top landing pages, which include the number of visitors, average session time, and bounce rate.

If you manually added Google Analytics to your blog, you need to log out of WordPress and into Google Analytics to see your bounce rate.

There are a variety of ways to display the bounce rate in Google Analytics, depending on what you’re looking for, which can be frustrating. We suggest looking at the bounce rates of your landing pages so you can see and pages your visitors are landing on and leaving.

To view your site’s bounce rate in Google Analytics, first sign in to your account. Go to Behavior » Site Content » Landing Pages, after that.

Knowing which pages your site visitors are most likely to land on can help you identify and address trouble areas. By seeing which of your pages perform the best, you can model the rest of your pages according to those that perform well, boosting the results that you receive.

Now, let’s look at how you can reduce the bounce rate on your website.

Tip One: Have a Direct Call to Action

Most visitors determine whether or not to remain on a website within seconds of arriving. To persuade site visitors to convert, make sure they understand what you can offer them and what you want them to do as soon as they enter your site.

Describe what you’re offering to site tourists as soon as they land on your site. Make sure the call to action is straightforward so people understand what actions you want them to take. Also, make sure you’re upfront and truthful about what you’re selling so customers don’t feel compelled to quit right away.

Should you wish to do so, you can consider downloading an analytics tool in order to see how many visitors to your website are downloading files. This can assist you in understanding how effective your call to action is, as well as how many people are actually being convinced to continue exploring your site after they see the call to action.

Tip Two: Boost Your Site Speed

The pace and consistency of your website have a big impact on whether or not people choose to stay. The longer your site takes to load, the more likely your visitors might become frustrated and leave without visiting another article.

In reality, visitors to your website expect it to load in two seconds or less. Anything slower than that can cause your visitors to leave your site, which may have a negative impact on your conversion rates.

You can make use of various tools available online in order to optimize the speed of your website as well as to optimize how fast it is. You can speed up your website by adhering to the suggestions that these tools provide you with in order to get your website running more smoothly.

Using a content delivery network (CDN), optimizing photos, investing in a quality web host, tracking plugin use, and using a caching plugin are some of the easiest ways to configure your site for faster page loading.

Tip Three: A/B Test Everything You Post

A/B checking on your website on a regular basis may reveal why people are bouncing and what makes them want to linger. After all, high bounce rates may be due to anything as simple as the color of your call-to-action button or the way your landing page directs visitors into your sales funnel.

HubSpot discovered that the red button received 21% more clicks than the green button after performing an A/B test of call-to-action button colors. While this is only an example of improved conversions thanks to button colors, the thing is, people have the propensity to leave your site if they don’t like what they see.

By running A/B tests, you can find what works best for your website, as well as which little changes you can make in order to improve engagement from visitors to the site. It is extremely important that you have a clear understanding of what works for your website so that you can get the best results. These tests can prove to be extremely helpful in that you can get an insight into the minds of the individuals who are visiting your website, and as a result, you can learn how to better target them.

To perform free A/B testing of your site’s content and make improvements to boost conversions, use the Google Optimize addon, which is designed right on top of Google Analytics.

The Bottom Line

After reading this article, you should have a much better understanding of bounce rates, as well as what you can do in order to reduce the rate itself. Lowering the bounce rate of your website means that you are engaging visitors to your page in a much more effective manner, boosting your page effectiveness substantially.