How to Reduce Your Website's Bounce Rate

This is a forum topic for discussing the article "How to Reduce Your Website's Bounce Rate":

http://www.elated.com/articles/reduce-your-website-bounce-rate/

Lots of handy tips and techniques to help you reduce bounce rates on your website.

Google Website Optimizer as mentioned is a good tool to help in optimizing landing page to reduce your bounce rate. Another useful tool is www.ClickTale.com because it will actully help you ' really see' what visitors are upto when they visit your site. This information will then help you know areas to focus on.

I actually know of a company that fired their web designer because they noticed that they were having a high bounce rates for several consecutive months despite their various efforts to rectify the situation. I believe this situation could have been avoid if the guy had applied some of these tips in this Elated post.

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http://www.mauconline.net

Thanks for your feedback mauco. ClickTale looks very useful, if a bit "Big Brother"-like! Great for usability testing.

Cheers,
Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Saw this interesting research about site metrics:

http://www.analyticsseo.com/blog/average-website-metrics-google-analytics-bounce-rate-time-on-site

Looks like a typical bounce rate is about 40 %.

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Nicole at www.analyticsseo.com

Bounce rate is extremely important. I'm constantly trying to reduce it on several sites. Nicole, I wish I could get it down to 40% -- I could live with that. I may be wrong about this, but it seems that people can spend considerable time on a web page, and then exit, and that counts as a bounce? If that's the case, it may be important to know how long they "viewed" your page before exiting. For example, if they spend 1 second, ouch! But if they spend 5 minutes, not so bad. I'll be sure to check out clicktale.

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Paul Stokes - www.eNewsletterSolutions.com

"Bounce rate" is only "important" for PPC landing pages. It means absolutely nothing at all for "organic" search.

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

@chrishirst: please elaborate on your comment?

Because I feel its important to both, but the level of importance (to either the landing page or 'organic' search) depends on the overall theme/purpose of the site. Or am I missing something here?

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http://www.mauconline.net

Yes, you are missing what "bounce rate" actually means for various types of page.

"organic search" is mainly just random individuals clicking links.

They may or may not be looking for your products or services, even moreso if you engage in the random, machine gun marketing of "social media".

These visitors are NOT targeted in any way shape or form.

What are they there for?
Why would they want to stay on your site?


What if your page is a lead generating page, Adsense or Affiliate ad loaded page?
100% bounce rate is desirable in those cases because visitors arrive and leave via the adverts.

Now if you have PAID FOR THAT VISIT to a specific page so you want them to leave via the checkout page. So in that case 100% bounce is NOT desirable.

"Bounce rate" means different things to different people, before you can state what "bounce rate" is best, "right" or "normal" you HAVE to know the purpose of the page.

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/