Bounce Rate: What It Is and How to Reduce It
Why is it critical to understand the bounce rate? What does this value mean? It is used to determine how many people “leave” our site after visiting it. The causes might vary, and understanding them can help us much in resolving any issues.
It goes without saying that the longer a person remains on a site or page, the more the contents respond to her need or interest. So let us try to figure out how this parameter is monitored and how we may use it to our advantage.
When a visitor views a website, they stay for a specific amount of time. Knowing how long visitors spend on a website is useful information. We can learn about the percentage of people that view a single page and then leave.
What is the bounce rate and how to know it
To clearly and uniquely explain this value which, we repeat, can give us valuable information on the effectiveness of our site, let’s take a simple example. Let’s say we have a site of our business that receives 50 visitors a day. If of these 30 leave the site immediately, the bounce rate will be 60%; if they drop out in 25, the bounce rate will be 50% and so on.
What does this all mean? In theory, a site with a low bounce rate has a good user participation rate, which is therefore well designed, in a nutshell, which is functional.
If the bounce rate is high, on the other hand, it means that the user has visited only one page and then left the site. The reasons may be different, so you should not be alarmed immediately, but in the presence of a high bounce rate, it is good to make the appropriate checks.
In this way we could know if we are facing a real problem or if, instead, the high bounce rate is not attributable to the characteristics of the site, such as in the case in which the user immediately finds what he is looking for and, having satisfied his need leaves the portal.
High bounce rate: the causes
We have said that the causes of a high bounce rate can be many, some are physiological, others indicate an actual problem or more problems.
The physiological causes are different, we list some of the most common:
Single page site: in this case the bounce rate is not a value that certifies the actual quality of a site, it is a very common condition for landing pages or sites consisting of a single page.
Specific search: the user is looking for something specific and therefore quickly scrolls through the search engine results and, just as quickly, leaves the site, whether he has found the information he was looking for, then satisfied his need, or have not found it and consequently look for it elsewhere.
The user has found what he was looking for: it often happens when the object of the search is a telephone number or the address of an activity such as, for example, hotels, restaurants, bars and so on.
Causes due to real site problems
On the other hand, there are causes of a high bounce rate that are attributable to real problems:
Irrelevant content: it is obvious that the user does not find what she was hoping for and leaves the portal.
Low-quality content: the content is relevant, but poorly written or not very usable and offers no value to the user.
Code errors: they can make the site difficult to use, such as broken links or blocking scripts that induce the user to leave.
Structure of the site not very usable: in this case there are no real errors at the code level, but the site is unclear, perhaps due to the graphics and font, or due to a menu that is too complex, or due to the slow page loading.
Too much advertising: too much advertising or with excessively invasive formats, as if they make it difficult to read the contents.
Made for ads: these are portals consisting mainly of advertising and whose purpose is to obtain clicks for sponsors.
How to improve your bounce rate
We then come to the fundamental topic: how to improve the bounce rate by intervening ad hoc on each specific problem.
Identify the problem: to remedy it, we must first know what the nature of the high bounce rate of our site is. We must therefore check the loading speed and what is fundamental.
Based on what you have been able to learn from this article, check your site and correct any critical issues without also neglecting the topic of on-page SEO, a factor that is not directly responsible for the abandonment of the site page, but which if taken care of and optimized, it makes the page much more usable.
