Bounce rates are a good indicator of how engaged visitors are on a particular website, as well as how relevant your content is to what they're searching. Various Internet marketing experts have found that the most successful businesses have a bounce rate under 50%, while anything over 70% is considered poor. A bounce rate below 50% indicates that the website is capturing the attention of the majority of visitors and getting them to interact more.
What Is It?
As defined by Google, a bounce rate "is the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting the site". In order to view your bounce rate, you'll need to get a Google Analytics code for your website. If you discover that the majority of visitors are bouncing from your site, you may want to look into one or more of the following areas to bring that percentage down.
Style and Design
If your website looks boring or has bright, distracting colors, this could be what's causing your low bounce rate. Nobody wants to look at a plain, boring site that doesn't have elements like a header, background, attractive color scheme, and a picture or two. Site navigation is also critical. Web design experts recommend that a navigation bar be attractive, easy to understand, and noticeable. Ways to accomplish this include making it a contrasting color and maybe even separating the buttons into different circular images.
Call to Action
Never underestimate the importance of a good Call to Action (CTA). A well-placed CTA can do wonders for your bounce rate, as it can get visitors to take the next step in the buying process. According to DMConfidential.com, an effective CTA button should be specific, large enough to stand out, not have a lot of clutter around it, have contrasting colors, and be a button instead of just text. Additionally, the wording of the CTA should be direct, convey value, and create a sense of urgency.
Broken Promises
Another common cause of lower bounce rates is not delivering on customer expectations. This includes things like misleading advertising, irrelevant content or content that doesn't engage the reader, and not having a consistent message for your brand or product. For this reason, it's important to make sure your message is consistent and clear throughout your website and in your advertising so that visitors won't feel deceived when they arrive at your website.
Load Time
In our modern society that requires instant gratification, it's a known fact that the longer a website takes to load, the higher the bounce rate will be. A recent Mashable article points out that if you have widgets or third-party content on your website, this could be increasing your webpage load time. Security breaches on your site can also cause it to slow down and can even corrupt your website, causing you to lose all your information. To prevent this from happening, make sure you have a website that can offer you security as well as fast loading speeds. It's also a good idea to look into online storage reviews and find one that meets your needs so that if you do lose your website data, you can get your website back up and running again quickly.