A Bounce is a visit by someone to your website where the visitor views just one page of your website, then leaves straight away. They ‘bounce’ onto and off your website.

The easiest measurement of how many bounces you are getting is the ‘Bounce Rate’. This illustrates how many bounces you are getting per hundred visitors. By acknowledging and analysing your bounce rate, you get to understand what visitors want from your site and how to give it to them.

Understanding Bounce Rates

This graph tells a nice little story. One of my clients was suffering from quite a high bounce rate. Whilst the website in question had plenty of visitors, they were, in over 70% of cases, bouncing straight off the website.

Improving Bounce Rates

With a little consultation and a few changes, we were able to instantly slash the bounce rate to a steady <1%, except for the odd blip! With just a few changes and one evening's work, we were able to make permanent changes to the fundamentals of the website and encouraged around 99% of visitors to take a look around the site. You'll see that the number of Pages per Visit is running at over 3, which is also a healthy sign that visitors are reading various pages of the site. There seems to be something there to keep visitors reading.

How can you reduce your Bounce Rate?

The key to dealing with your bounce rate is to use your analytics tool to identify the worst offending pages, and quickly make some changes. Add good content that carries trains of thought around your site, and then provide links to these relevant areas of your website. Add interesting new content that inspires your valuable visitors to get deeper into your website. This way you will be giving your visitors what they want, rather than constantly breaking promises and disappointing them.