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Reducing the Bounce Rate on your website

A high bounce rate on a website indicates that your visitors are not engaging once they arrive on your website. That means your website isn't as effective as it could be. Find out here how to reduce your bounce rate.

A high bounce rate on a website indicates that your visitors are not engaging once they arrive on your website (click here if you're not sure what the bounce rate is).

In general, you want your website to have a low bounce rate. After all, if you can't convince your visitors to view more than one page on your website, you probably can't convince them to do anything else either.

If you only focus on the overall bounce rate of your website, you won't make much progress in reducing it. You need to dig into your web analytics data and find out more about the traffic that is bouncing. Then you need to look at how to reduce the bounce rate for that traffic. You will most likely find that some traffic sources bounce more than others. You may also find that you are less bothered about the bounce rate on some traffic sources. Either way, your efforts to reduce the bounce rate will be more targeted once you have a more detailed understand of what traffic is bouncing.

If you segment your website traffic, you will be able to identify particular traffic that bounces more than the average for your wesite. Once you segment your traffic you can ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are any traffic sources delivering traffic that bounces more than others?
  • Are there any particular landing pages on your website that have higher bounce rates than the rest?
  • Are there any keywords where visitors tend to bounce more frequently than others?

As you dig in to this information, you will probably start to see patterns. You may find that organic search bounces more than referral traffic. Some pages will bounce more than others. There may be something about the layout, design or content of high-bounce pages that differs from pages with a lower bounce rate. It could also be that certain keywords result in higher bounces than others.

Whatever patterns you identify, it's important to dig down into the next level so you can pinpoint the reasons for the bounce rate and start to address those reasons.

 

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