Bounce Rate Blues

You're driving visitors to your website, but they are leaving before they have a chance to look around. "Bounces" off your page will lead to a higher bounce rate - but what does that mean for your website efforts?

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Google Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. So what does this mean in layman terms? It means that once people are brought to your site, something happens, or something doesn't happen, and they lose interest and leave your website. what is a high bounce rate?

Reasons Behind a High Bounce Rate

Since the rise of the mobile revolution, the average human attention span has dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 to merely eight seconds in 2017. That means you only have EIGHT SECONDS to capture the attention of a website visitor. Factors like slow load time for the page or images will frustrate visitors and bombarding them with additional offers will steal their attention from your intended content. Some other factors that play into higher bounce rates include:

Irrelevant & Unexpected Content. Visitors seeing something unexpected and unrelated to what they came for. Not everyone likes surprises. This tactic is often seen with click bait - the title of an article is intriguing enough to click, but the content isn't strong or relevant enough to keep your attention.
Difficult to Read. Visitors want to be able to skim through content to find what they are looking for - make it easy for them. Headlines and subheadings help visitors scan blocks of text quickly. The content they expect to find should be located in the appropriate section. If they cannot spot the content by scanning the headlines or subheadings, they may not take the time to search your site.
Reaching the Wrong Audience. So maybe it's not your content, but rather the visitors arriving at your page. If your landing page sells a product that’s targeted at private music teachers, but you advertise all over communities of public school teachers… you are close… but you’ve missed the mark.
Errors & Grammar. This is pretty self-explanatory—no one wants to read something that looks as if it was written by a six-year-old. It’s sloppy and unprofessional.
Producing a lot of low-quality content that’s hard to understand. The quality of copy on your landing page goes well beyond the grammar and spelling. The copy needs to quickly communicate to the visitor that you understand their problem and you have a solution that could be used to solve it.
Making your landing pages hard to read or visually unappealing. Any distracting elements can reduce the credibility of your site, which causes visitors to search for the nearest exit. Most common problems involve issues of legibility. A poor or unpolished visual design can distract visitors and reduce the amount of time the person is willing to look at the page for purely aesthetic reasons.
Making the visitor feel like they are being scammed. Within the first few seconds of arriving at a website, visitors will automatically scan for content and design elements that communicate credibility and safety.
Using lots of attention grabbing images that steal the show from your call to action. This falls under the concept of a poorly designed page. People spend so much time curating stock art, background images, rotating sliders, thumbnails, and other images that steal attention but when a landing page is filled with distracting images, it lowers the readability and therefore increases the bounce rate.
Not having a clear next step. Having a clear call to action means the visitor knows quickly what their next step should be and where it is on the page.
Asking for too much information. As a general rule, you should not be asking for information that you are NOT going to actually use to help the potential customer on the next step of their journey.

When creating or editing your website pages, remember that simple page layouts can communicate a lot of information in a short period of time. Focus on what you really want the visitor to do on your landing page. Make sure all the copy, images, and call to action buttons are gently nudging people in that direction. Visitors will scan your landing page quickly to see if you have what they came to your site to find.

Ready to learn more about bounce rates? Check out our blog Busting Your Bounce Rate. Here, we break down five different ways you can improve your bounce rate

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