Bounce rate is one of the important metrics to analyze your website traffic, visit quality, goals and conversion rate. Bounce rate is nothing but “the percentage of single-page visit(s) in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page”. A high bounce rate indicates that the entrance pages for visitors are not relevant to visitors.
By providing quality and relevant content on your landing pages, you can reduce your site’s bounce rate and thereby improve your conversions / goals / subscribers and overall quality of your website.
Following are some useful tips, resources and tools to improve your site’s bounce rate.
Optimize your website for faster load time and readability
Faster load time of a web page definitely attracts more user attention compared to design heavy pages which take relatively longer time to load. Depending on your website needs, you have to find a good balance between load time and design – features. For instance, to portray an image gallery, you might want to use a JavaScript/jQuery based slideshow rather than using a flash file. This would give you an option to compress the images and JavaScript code to render the page quickly, rather than having to wait for the flash file to load completely.
So by optimizing your website for faster load time and readability, your site visitors will find the information they are looking for quickly with a relatively faster load time. Here are some resources and tips to optimize your web pages for faster load time.
Page Speed
This is an open source add-on which enables web developers and webmasters to compression images, get suggestions about improving page speed by compressing CSS and JavaScript code. You might want to read more about using page speed.
Google Webmaster Tools
Webmaster Tools provides you with a website performance graph under Dashboard > Labs > Site Performance. You can make use of it to analyze your website(s) load time speed over the past few months.
This page also provides you with page speed suggestions based on Googlebot’s view of the page. To see how a web page appears in plain text, type a search query in Google and click on ‘Cached’ under the text snippet. Then, click on ‘Text only version’ as in following image. This will give you a good idea about the distribution of text vs images and media on your site.
You might also want to use the fetch as Googlebot feature in Google Webmaster Tools.
Website Optimizer
If you are testing between a couple of designs for a specific landing page to drive more traffic and increase conversion
rate, you can make use of A/B testing provided by Google to test your websites for better performance and speed.
Make sure your website is optimized for relevant / related search queries. Google Webmaster Tools provides you with the list of queries people are using worldwide to reach your website. The list of search queries would be increasing over time based on your site authority and search terms (keywords) people type-in to reach your site.
For instance, your site might be optimized for ‘automobiles’ but not for ‘cars’. So, you might want to optimize your site for such related / relevant terms so that you can drive traffic for related keywords / synonyms of terms as well.
Additional resources
- Tools and Downloads – Google Code: Contains list of useful tools for web page analysis, web debugging, resource optimization and performance benchmarking.
- Useful case studies about conversion rate optimization
- Readability: This is a Firefox add-on that strips the unnecessary information and shows the main content in a single column of easy-to-read text.
- Google Webmaster Help – YouTube Channel: Why doesn’t search query data in Webmaster Tools appear to match what I see when searching?
Analyze your website traffic: social media reactions, comments, returning visitors etc.,
Heat Maps
A heat map is a visual chart to analyze where most people look when they open a web site or page. By analyzing a heat map, you can re-organize / re-design your existing websites to meet the information needs of your target audience.
[Image Source: Squidoo]
Heat maps can be used to analyze high performance vs poor performance areas on a landing page. You might want to read more about the importance of a heat map.
Crazyegg, Fusestats, Corunet, ClickHeat are some of the useful services which enable you to create heat maps for your web pages and thereby analyze your visitor behavior, clicks and hot spots.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides some incredible statistics about your website traffic. It enables you to analyze entry, exit pages, unique pageviews and various other useful metrics. Using these statistics you can try to improve content quality and the look and feel of web pages which drive the most traffic for your site.
Posting Frequency
If you are a blogger and are always guessing about an ideal posting frequency, then analyze your heat maps, click through rate, exit pages and other metrics to come up with a decent (article) posting frequency. As too much / less content would turn your visitors off, it’s always better to research well and publish articles at decent time intervals.
How many clicks away is your most compelling information?
Visitors expect the information they are looking for to be available on the homepage or at most a couple of clicks away and not hidden in a web of pages. Always, try to have your most compelling information on your homepage. A good reference I found for ideally organizing content and pages is Outspoken Media. If you observe the homepage, the initial blurb highlights their key services (with hyperlinks) followed by a broad overview of their company and latest news items. The navigation is simple and most of their compelling information is just a click away from the homepage. So, organize your navigation such that readers don’t have to search through or spend more time to find what they are looking for.
This focus of this article was to briefly cover tools, resources and tips to analyze and re-organize your website to reduce bounce rate and thereby drive more traffic.
Additional Resources
I use clicktail, it helps me know what is happening on my site and its heatmaps and videos show me i can increase my conversions
We really enjoyed this post. So much in fact that we included it on our list of “8 Resources to Help you Improve the Bounce Rate of your Website” ! you can access it here if you are interested : http://tumblr.com/xkzhs1db0
Great advice, the firefox plugin is really handy for optimising a site. We are currently looking into using more caching on our servers to give more performance, hopefully we should see some improvement on our current bounce rate.