Web experts tell us that new website visitors decide whether to stay and look around or leave a site in about 3 to 5 seconds. If this is true, and we believe it is, you have to ask yourself, â€would I stay on my company’s home page or landing page more than 3 seconds?†It’s hard to be honest about this in regard to your own website, the only way to get a fair answer is to see what people do when they arrive at your website for the first time. A bounce rate analysis is just what the doctor ordered †think of it not as a cure, but as an x-ray that you read to see if there are any problems. The â€x-ray†can help you to decide on where to focus your attention to improve the â€stickiness†of your website. However, you cannot take one x-ray and hope to learn how to improve your site. You have to take different views, more like a CAT scan, when you explore bounce rates. You have to explore differences in bounce rates by customer segments, i.e., who is bouncing off your site most frequently. In addition, it is helpful to understand the definition of a bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who come to your web site during a specific period, view only one page, and then leave your site. For example, if a user comes to your site through organic search, and views only the landing page (i.e., does not click on any other links on the page to access at least one other page) that visit would be registered as a bounce. The bounce rate is computed as a ratio. The numerator for the ratio or fraction is the total number of visits that resulted in a bounce for a specified period. The denominator is the total number of visits during the same period. For example, if your site had 40 bounces over the course of 100 visits to your homepage and another landing page you created, your bounce rate would be 40% (40/100). Furthermore, if 50 visits were to the homepage and 25 of those were bounces, you homepage specific bounce rate would be 50% (25/50). Bounced visits are not limited to visits generated by search engines. If you send out an email with links that direct subscribers back to your site, and a subscriber only views the landing page you provided, that would also register as a bounce. A first step in the analysis of bounce rates is to separate new visitors from returning visitors. Next, you compare the bounce rates of these two groups. Now explore the new visitor group by the page they landed on to examine which pages are especially problematic or particularly productive. Then look at how visitors found these pages on your site. Keep digging until you have a clear picture of what is driving your overall bounce rate. Focus on the areas that generate the highest bounce rates, fix the worse case [often easier said than done] and move to the next highest bounce rate problem. Systematically identifying and addressing bounce rate issues will make a material difference in the performance of your website. Unfortunately, you cannot perform this exercise once and than forget about bounce rates there after. Like most website optimization tasks, it is an ongoing challenge. Marketplace conditions change and you must change with them to stay at the top of your game. We recommend you set up a systematic and recurring schedule of website analytical reviews (bounce rates being only one of several areas you investigate). Add in an optimization plan and you are on your way to driving more traffic and converting the traffic you receive.
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