Just about everything you do with your website's structure, content and design is aimed at one thing-keeping the visitor around long enough to buy, subscribe, fill out your questionnaire or whatever it is you want them to do. There are as many ways to do this as there are "web experts." Generally speaking, you want your visitors "engaged," if not downright shackled to your site, and the way to do it is to ensure that related content is interlinked and displayed in such a way that they "stick around to click around." If their first look doesn't get a commitment (whatever that may be), perhaps the second will.
A common term for describing this visitor engagement-or, rather, the lack of it-is the "bounce rate," expressed as a percentage of initial visitors that leave from the same page they arrived at. Using Google Analytics (GA) and other tools, you can get a bead on the number of visitors that "bounce" without viewing any other pages of the site. Don't forget that not all inbound links to your site will be to your home or entry page, so your eventual strategy needs to be site-wide.
Basics of bouncing
From a low rate of "bouncing" you can reasonably infer that visitors are exploring your site and engaging with the content. This is a very important metric, much more crucial to your eventual success than the more talked-about "unique visitors" count. Just having unique visitors stay long enough to add to the overall count should be considered a very negative stat, frankly, because they were not engaged or even curious enough to go for a second page view.
The bounce rate itself is only a useful statistic if it can be analyzed for its composition, that is, if you can sort the bounces into four main categories, or sources:
-Low-value referrers
-Visitors linking directly from another site
-Visitors linking via search engines
-Your loyal users
Since visitors arrive at, assess and relate to your website in markedly different ways, you need to discover as much as you can about them, beginning with where they came from (the "originating source"). When you know the sources, you can begin to observe behavior patterns. With that knowledge, you can implement strategies to keep your visitors engaged, which may involve site map, architecture, design and copy changes.
Apples, oranges and baselines
The "apples and oranges" cliche is here to remind you not to measure bounce rates of one visitor source against a different one. By analyzing your sales, subscriptions, completed forms or return visits-whatever it is that spells success for the site-you should be able to identify the traffic source that is performing the best for you. Ultimately, of course, you will want to assess the bounce rates of the different sources against the overall goal for your site.
Although it's difficult to define a "standard" bounce rate as a baseline, it is still a metric that is found in every analytics tool. Used correctly, it can help you focus quickly on the places you're wasting money and the site content that needs revising. Most experts agree that it is hard to get your bounce rate lower than 20%, and that 35% would be cause for concern while a rate above 50% warrants some serious first aid. (For blogs, the thinking is that 50% is about average but 75% is where you should start worrying-and fixing things.)
What to do?
It all comes down to optimizing your web pages and structuring them into a unified whole, one which will add value for both visitors, arriving "blind" through a referral link or search engine, and loyal readers/users. Make sure your navigation is clear and logical, position your links around your content, think like a visitor and never try to cut corners or do "just enough."
There are a couple of smart ways to reduce that bounce rate, both in preparation and execution. As far as preparation, test the site with a broad group of users, getting them to enter specific pages from other specific pages. Ask them for their feedback then listen carefully. You might just hear some good ideas for improvement. On the site itself, try exposing "next steps" and giving visitors specific actions to take if they are engaged with that first page. Add links to additional information both within the content and around it.
There are a lot of ways to orient visitors to your environment and get them to move in a somewhat predictable manner. Perhaps the most important principle of all is to make all links highly visible and clearly relevant to the content of the current page. Do your homework before committing to any major revisions, and be prepared to tweak your site in every possible way for the duration. It's a never-ending task, and now an accepted part of most every business. People may argue about whether or not the Constitution is a "living document" that changes with the times, but there's not a doubt in the world that your website is!