Monday, November 03, 2008

How to reduce Bounce Rate percentage?



First let us be aware of what is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics. Most of the definitions found on the web are bit confusing (as I found them so). Thus, would like to be more clear on what Bounce Rate means.

Bounce rate represent the single-page visitors who bounce out of the website to a different website. Bounce rate is the percentage of initial visitors to the visitors who bounced to other website. In other words, instead of visiting the other pages of the website the visitors close the window, type in other url or click the link of the other website on the page. This is different from Exit Ratio. Exit Ratio is the ratio of all visitors to the visitors who have exit from the website. These visitors can be single-page or multiple-page visitors. Bounce rate only considers single-page visitors.

Now to know why this bounce occurs. If you have a high bounce rate for your website or web pages here are few points which you can ponder upon to make the initial visitors to go into the website.

1. content on the page is not interesting for the visitors,
2. too many external links are available on the page for the visitors to click and go to other website,
3. few links are available on the page to take the visitors the to inner pages (or they are not clearly visible for the visitors),
4. irrelevant visitors coming to the website (not target audience)
5. Page takes too much of time to download - visitors may close the window rather than waiting for the page to download
6. Visitors feel confused after seeing the page

If at all, you want to show external website links on the page/website, do open them in a new window. Just keeping the hope that, the visitor may later visit your website and find it interesting and move into the inner pages.