Monitor Bounce Rate in your page & Reduce it

The bounce rate of a website can be said to be the number of times visitors leave that website after merely viewing one page. To better interpret it, think of when you are at a boring party, what do you say when you want to leave? “Let’s ‘bounce’”

The bounce rate of a website which is usually calculated in percentage is calculated thus: Total number of ‘bounces’ on a web page / Total number of visitors on that web page.

For instance, if you had 20 visitors on your web page and 15 bounced after viewing only one page, your bounce rate is 75% (15/20 * 100).

Ideally, the lower the bounce rate, the better it is for your website. 

However, this depends on the goals you have set for the website.

While bounce rates percentages are relative to the website's niche, on average, the grading of bounce rates is given below:

81% and higher = very bad

71 – 80% = poor

51 – 70% = average

50% and lower = good

A good bounce rate percentage for a blog would be a % lower than 40-50%

The bounce rate is one of the multiple parameters of a website that can be monitored using tools like Google Analytics. Along with the time in page is one of the most important.

Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate

It's important to distinguish the difference between the exit rate and bounce rate. While Bounce Rate is the percentage that was the only page visited in one particular user, the Exit Rate of a page is the percentage of exits about the number of visits to that specific page.

Why Is It Important?

One beautiful thing about your bounce rate is that it enables you to see the number of users who are mere visitors to your page and those who are customers.

Knowing this statistic can help you better your website in so many ways.

For one, if the bounce rate of your web page is higher than the bounce rate of a competitor’s web page, you can take a look at and study the competitor’s web page, see what users want, what they respond to and implement it in your web page to help reduce its bounce rate too.

Also, monitoring your website’s bounce rate can help you decipher what you are doing wrong; most probably, your content is not responding to your visitors’ demands, and start working on improving them.

How to reduce your Bounce Rate

To reduce the Bounce Rate of your page, you must write content that engages your audience. Use images, infographics, format the text of your posts, etc. The general rule is: answer your public expectations. You can find more information about how to engage your users here.

Top 5 SEO Tools to monitor your Bounce Rate

• Google Analytics (Free): a very robust tool with insights into a wide range of aspects about your website's performance in the online space with custom tips on website optimization.
• Clicky (Paid): a mid-tier entrant concerning analytics and is an exciting tool. Different from Google Analytics by providing real-time data.
• Piwik (Paid): Piwik was developed as a Google Analytics alternative meant for users mostly concerned about data funneling to Google. Must be used with its hosting and offers a wide range of benefits.
• Open Web Analytics (OWA) (Free): web tracker and monitor which is open source. No fees whatsoever but uses donations as support. Has a similar structure with Google Analytics with no limits to track.
• Mint (Paid): quite new on the market but works through the incorporation of best features and practices of leading competitors. The interface is sleek and very user-friendly. Ground-up structuring for excellent reporting so that ROI can be found and presented easily to stakeholders

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to help you to reduce the Bounce Rate of your website

• Reduce Bounce Rate (Paid): get data about on-site rates as well as bounce rate in real-time for Google Analytics which computes on-site times about how much time the user spends visiting your site and when they last viewed your page.
• Google Analytics by MonsterInsights (Paid): users of Google Analytics can do well to explore this plugin. Currently has over 11 million downloads with very fantastic feature list.
• Google Analytics for WordPress (Free): Google has created the Google analytics tool to help you in website index-tracking on things like the number of sessions, page views for every session, bounce rate, as well as time spent on your website.
• MonsterInsights (Paid): WordPress users would find this plugin very useful as it is user-friendly and lets you carry out connections between WordPress sites and Google Analytics.
• Analytify – Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress (Paid): simplify your use of google analytics for WordPress in making posts, optimizing pages and more. Google analytics stats are presented aesthetically everywhere.

Did you know? Not every bounce is a fault of you or your website as some people could be seeking one-off information. The objective always should be to get your user's interact with your website, using engaging content on your site.

Expert’s suggestion: “If you run an e-commerce site that also has a blog, you may want to implement a segmented bounce rate as your blog posts may have a very different average bounce rate than your products” – Neil Patel (https://neilpatel.com/blog/bounce-rate-analytics/)