How to reduce your bounce rate

In our last post, Why People Leave Your Web Site, we referenced the Bounce Rate, and why its not something you want your site to have much of.

In order to understand how to reduce your bounce rate you need to know why it is happening. Here are some unacceptable reasons why you might have a bounce, and what you can do to fix it:

• Your site takes too long to load. This could mean you need more bandwidth/better server or, more likely, you need to optimize your site.
• Your presentation is too simple/complicated. We could call this the ugly factor. While it might be unfair, people do judge a book by its cover. How your site looks will influence people’s decision to stay or leave.
• You provide too much information. Long paragraphs, longer pages, no headlines, etc. make your text difficult to read. People want fast information, and if they can’t find it, they’ll go somewhere where they can.

However, you might have some reasonable “bounces”. Here are some acceptable reasons:

• The user found the information right away – they were looking for your address and found it, wanted to know the price of X and now they do, etc. – no need to keep looking.
• The user clicked on the wrong link/typed in the wrong address, noticed, and left right away. I’m looking for ABC, you’re CBA, and I figured it out. – This is a bummer, but it happens. The site address could have changed, a spelling error occurs, etc., but then you get the incorrect user, who may not even be looking for what you have to offer.

Because of things like this, you will usually have some bounce.

So what is an acceptable bounce rate?

This will often vary depending upon what type of site you offer. Just as sometimes you will walk into a store and leave, your users will not always purchase or even stay very long. This may be your site, it may be them.

The more niche your site, the less accidental users you will get. An Intranet site will be about as pure as you can get. One Intranet site I watch actually has a bounce rate of less than 7.75%. People generally only go there if they need to.

I oversee a niche site, that while they only get about 140 visits a day, their bounce rate hovers around 15-18%. This means very few people leave when they see the site, and they can convert more users. They also get a lot of links for authority sites, and word-of-mouth advertising. Their off-line marketing of their website helps them immensely.

For a more general website, what you will hear varies. Anywhere from 40-55% is considered common and acceptable. I like to find what I have, and work on reducing it from there.