Online analytics can be a needlessly obscure and dense arena of information with which to engage. This is especially true if, rather than being a tech genius, your professional strengths are tied to a particular industry that just happens to be operating online, given the realities of the current marketplace.
For the uninitiated, one term that can be particularly unclear is “bounce rate.” The bounce rate of your website refers to the percentage of users who simply visit your site and then have no other interactions with it. These are the visitors that “bounce” right off of your website.
So, if someone visits your site and ends up engaging (by providing an email address for your mailing list or making a purchase), they will not count toward the site’s bounce rate. For instance, if ten people visit your website and only two of them interact in any way, your bounce rate for that group of visitors would be 2 out of 10 – or 20%.
How Your Bounce Rate Can Help and Why It Matters
A typical website for an online business has a bounce rate of anywhere from 40%-60%. Knowing the bounce rates of your business’s various pages can be an incredibly useful tool in growing your customer base and fine-tuning your approach to conversions. There are several ways that your business can implement specific actions based on the bounce rates of respective pages on your site.
Fix Design or Content that Doesn’t Work
Knowing the bounce rate for your landing page, as well as any other pages on your business’s website, can help you to identify potentially problematic features of those pages. Does your checkout process appear too complex and intimidate potential customers? Is the copy on your landing page confusing or otherwise ineffective? A high bounce rate on a particular page might let you know.
Amplify Design and Content that Works
In the same way that a high bounce rate can give you a clue that your design or content needs work, a low bounce rate may speak to a particularly well-designed page or a page with effective text or visuals. Using the bounce rate as one (among many) measures can provide evidence that the strategy of a specific page is highly successful and should be replicated.
Keyword Relevance, Guiding Traffic, and SEO
Utilizing the bounce rate as an indicator for a given page can also provide insights into the effectiveness and coherence of your pages’ SEO. If a page has a particularly high bounce rate, it could be because the keywords that are incorporated are misleading or confusing to visitors.
For instance, if the keywords or other SEO on an information page brings traffic that would be better suited for a sales page, that page will be much less effective and is therefore likely to have a disproportionately high bounce rate.
While looking into online analytics may seem like an intimidating prospect, learning how to draw important inferences from your pages’ bounce rates can be an invaluable tool.
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