High bounce rate and ways to control it

Do you experience a high bounce rate on your website? Don’t worry it is quite common and can be handled easily. Most marketing professionals experience such issues because their website is not doing what it is supposed to. The best thing is to take this as a chance to improve.

Bounce Rate is defined as the number or percentage of people(visitors) who land n your website but left immediately due to some reasons.

A higher bounce rate is not always a problem. For eg. When a person lands on your site just to take the details of your business like address or contact details, he might leave your page as soon as he gets what he is looking for. This is not bad as it will provide you conversion.

The actual problem comes when a person lands on your site, bounces back and is not converted. To find out the bounce rate, you can use tools like Google Analytics.

It will not just share the bounce rate of a page but it can also inform you of the bounce rate of a website. It will provide you parameters like visitors on your site, average page on each visit, time spent on the site.

A good bounce rate is one that falls between the percentages of 26 to 70. Your goal should be to keep the bounce rate as low as possible and conversion as high as possible. Don’t get irritated if you have a high bounce rate site-wise, you can check the rate of each page and work on improving it.

Possible reasons

1.       Bad Content

When people generally visit any particular website, they hope to retract something useful from it. Content of a site, act as a source of conveying the brand’s message to the target audience. But if the content is not addressing the needs of your visitors, they will not be on your site for long.

 Develop engaging content, while keeping in mind why you are creating that. If your site has a lot of ambiguous, messy, boring, or irrelevant content your audience will bounce away causing your conversions to suffer.

2.       Bad user experience

Visitors coming to your site will identify in a few seconds if they want to go further or bounce. If the colors, layout, or design of your site is not appealing they will move away immediately. Also, they won’t stay if your site doesn’t provide them easy navigation.

The audience wants an experience of the site, which is easy and quick and adequate content to turn your visitors into customers.

3.       No mobile responsiveness

Most of the traffic to any website comes from mobile users. If your website lacks in being mobile responsive, it has a high chance of losing a lot of potential customers. Websites that are no optimized for mobile, don’t look good when used on mobiles. This is a way to high bounce rate.

4.       Single Page site or affiliate landing page

If you are an affiliate marketer, your goal must be to send the traffic to the merchant’s site deliberately. And if your landing page has a high bounce rate you are doing your job right. Same is the scenario with the single page websites.

Visitors might move away since there is nowhere else they can go in such a case.

5.       Bad links from another site

Sometimes you receive unqualified traffic from the linked sources you cave created backlinks from. This traffic can serve you a high bounce rate. This might be a result of carelessly written content for the link.

If you find any such case, politely ask the owner to remove the link to your site or update the settings.

6.       Technical error

If you notice a high rate of people bouncing from your site and people spending just a few seconds on your page, then it must be a page with a 404 error or a blank page or else not getting properly loaded. Correct the issue or talk to someone who can do it.

7.       Slow speed

Another reason for the high bounce-rate can be the loading speed of your website. When a website takes a long time to get loaded, chances are high the visitors will move to another website.

Overcoming High Bounce rate

1. If you have a website whose overall bounce rate is high, you must check for the page whose bouncing rate is extremely affected than others. Now visit the page as a visitor and look at other indicators of the page. Find out if the page is still fulfilling the goal even after the high bounce rate. Then check the website design, navigation, and user experience. Identify, if the page has met your goals.
2. Website recording tool is very helpful to know how the visitors are navigating through your site. It will help you understand where you can do the improvements. This can be beneficial for pages with a high bounce rate.
3. Heatmaps will help you identify where most of the engagement occurs in a site. And the spot you find most of the people clicking can be a place to fit in a call-to-action button.
4. With the recordings and Heatmaps, you can improve the bounce rate. In A/B testing you can replicate an existing page and make a change to an element, like a headline. By serving the same page with two different headlines to the same group of audience, can help you determine which one is more pleasing.
5. A/B testing will help you find the elements that will help you improve the bounce rate to get an increased conversion rate.
6. After doing the testing, you will have to implement the strategy that will remove the glitch causing a bad or high bounce rate.
7. The last step in the process to get rid of the high bounce rate, and attain a normal one is to repeat the above-mentioned steps.

If you are serving your audience with exactly what they are looking for, you will receive an average bouncing rate of visitors. And they will want to browse your site more and convert to customers.