What can I do about a high bounce rate?
If you are concerned about your bounce rate you need to find out what is causing it. There are a number of things that could be at fault - most importantly these are likely to be:
i) a poorly designed online marketing programme driving traffic to your site that is either directing people to the wrong page on your site, driving people less likely to be interested in your services to you or maybe not delivering what people expected in your ads
ii) issues with the design, layout, content or structure of your site
How can I identify the cause of my website's high bounce rate?
If you are using Google Analytics there are a number of reports that you can use to help you get to the bottom of this. When you first log in you will be given an overall bounce rate for your entire site on your site dashboard. This figure is put together using the bounce rate for each of your individual landing pages.
Remember it may be that 50% of your traffic arrives at your home page which you spent a lot of time thinking about and for which the bounce rate is reasonably good at 35%. However it may also be that the remainder of visits to your site land on specific product pages for which the bounce rate is high - e.g. 70% (maybe they were put together in a hurry or the way you drive traffic to these isn't great). Clearly in this example your homepage is performing well but your product pages need some work.
Google Analytics lets you monitor in detail where your bounces are originating from. The following reports are the most useful:
1. Content / Top Landing Pages - this report shows the pages that people land on when they first reach your website. By default they are sorted by the number of people that arrive at each.
Depending on the size of your site it is a good idea to check through the top 20 - 30 landing pages. In the right hand column you will see that the bounce rate for each particular page is shown. These can vary hugely - I have seen some pages on the same site with a bounce rate as low as 10% and others at 90%! Pages with a high bounce rate indicate that there is either a problem with the content or setup of that page or the way that you are driving traffic to it.
2. Traffic Sources / Referring Sites - If you have paid to advertise on a site or for your inclusion in a directory check this report to identify referring sites that end up in a high bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high then it may be that the referring site simply doesn't capture traffic that is relevant enough to the services you provide. Alternatively it may be that the link from the referring site isn't taking people to the right page on your site.
3. Traffic Sources / Keywords - If you are actively targetting keywords through SEO and in particular if you are paying for them through e.g. Google Adwords it's very important to know whether these keywords are actually working for you. If a keyword is driving a lot of traffic to you but looking at this report reveals that it ends up in an 80% bounce rate then you are probably either wasting your money with it, are directing people to the wrong page or the quality of your landing page needs to be addressed.
