Bounce rate is one of the important term in web traffic analysis. If you didn't give much care about bounce rate, that may affect your search engine ranking as well. Earlier my blog is having high bounce rate of 90%. Which means 90 percentage of visitors are “bouncing” away after landing on your site. There are plenty of reasons for higher bounce rate. One of the main reason for higher bounce rate is lack of engaging content. Any way I manged to reduce bounce rate to 55% after some hard work.
Here it is definition according to WikiPedia
Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.
Which means bounce rate is quite different from exit rate.
Monitoring Bounce Rate
You can monitor bounce rate of your blog using Google analytics. If you are using any other tool for monitoring website traffic, can simply calculate Bounce rate by
Bounce Rate:Total number of visitors viewing one page only/Total number of visits
Reasons for High Bounce Rate
Links from your website to external sites, absence of engaging content, newly created blog, Having different niches in same blog where one is quite different from other one, Interlinking posts. One another reason for higher bounce rate is huge amount of ads in your website. Some more reasons are listed here.
- Design of your blog
- High page loading time
- Absence of easy page navigation
- Using unreadable fonts.
Tips for Decreasing Bounce Rate
Keeping low bounce rate indicates growth of your blog. You can do some simple tweaks for decreasing bounce rate. I am not that much successful for decreasing bounce rate of this blog. But I manged to keep it near 55% to 60 %. But I am very successful with my another sports blog(40%). Valuable and engaging content will definitely improve number of page views from a single person landing on your blog. Unique content will also help to keep lower bounce rate. Page loading time is also one another important factor. If a page is taking long time to load then it should definitely increase bounce rate and exit rate.
You have to take care of some factors like design, fonts, font size, color schemes etc. Using lot of colors in a same page may decrease interest of reader.
Related posts at the end of every post should help you to decrease bounce rate. But you should make sure related posts are showing in related post are.
Linking with in your blog will also help to solve this problem. Make sure affiliate links and external links should open in new window.
Avoid bulk advertisements. In this case you have to think deeply. Plan placement of advertisements for better ctr while keeping an eye on bounce rate.
Here I am concluding this small post about Bounce rate. If you have any suggestions to decrease bounce rate please do mention here. Try to suggest some tips for improving readability of this blog.
Amit Shaw
ramnadh