Have you ever looked at your Google Analytics and wondered why is my bounce rate so high? Or why is the average time spent on my page low?
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What is a Bounce Rate
Your website bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Why is your Bounce Rate High?
Your website bounce rate is high because:
- Your website visitor clicks the back button on their browser.
- Your visitor enters a new web address in their browser bar.
- Your website visitor closes the browser window or tab.
- Visitors stay inactive for more than 30 minutes (default setting for Google Analytics unless changed) and the session times out.
- Visitors click an outbound (external site to your Google Analytics tracked URL) link
In these five steps, Google Analytics knows it is a bounce because no other tag/ custom event has fired off for your given site.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
Rather than use the common reply “it depends” there are some general rules you can apply to your bounce rate results.
Under 20%: Although it looks amazing, you probably have a tracking problem. The common one is a duplicate tag e.g. added to website plugin plus in website theme <head> tag. Or another example, it’s been added to Google Tag Manager too.
Over 35%: It would be good to look into, but not too alarming depending on what pages make up this result. Anything over 50% though and you shall check the data. Bear in mind that bounce rate can be healthy over 50 if the intent of the page or setup is designed for people to get the info and leave e.g. a blog post with not many relevant next steps/inter-links.
Over 90%: Now this is when you can ring those alarm bells! It may be a tracking problem, slow page speed issue, or the content just isn’t there. Investigate this to see if anything is amiss.
Best %: It depends on the page and its purpose. Bear in mind as well that you should keep a benchmark of the most important pages you want to track to keep an eye out for any ups and downs out of the ordinary. You can even set up alerts for this in Google Analytics to make your life easier.
Important things to know about Bounce Rates
Typically your bounce rate will increase when you are doing paid advertising because the quality of the traffic will change, often the case for social – given we know that most of that comes via mobile for a lot of advertisers and mobile already has a higher bounce rate in general.
Those returning to your website or coming from organic search usually have a lower bounce rate so long as the content is relevant to them and their query. That is because these users have higher intent compared to ones being pushed to your site from paid ads and the like.
How to decrease your Bounce Rate
- Make your website easy to search: Categorize your content and add a search bar
- Your Website Navigation is too complicated: remove sliders and videos on your home page.
- Change your call to action: you should also think about what specific action you want users to take when they’ve consumed whatever content you’re offering.
- Optimize for mobile: this is a no-brainer!
- Site Speed: If your website takes too long to load, people will bounce faster than a rubber ball.
- Use sidebar widgets and ad promotions sparingly
- Use a logical internal linking structure: Link to related post and not your home page.
- Fix your images: Compress, Captions, and ALT Texts.
Book a Website Audit
Not sure if you are on the right track to grow your website? Reach out to Click Experts for a website audit – an in-depth analysis of your website, from design, heading tags, metadata and content, internal and external linking, and site speed, among many other factors influencing your site’s performance.
