When reviewing your site content in Google analytics you will have noticed that your pages have a percentage bounce rate allocated, what might not be so obvious is what this number means in relation to the effectiveness of your pages.
To really understand this metric you need to know what analytics really means by a page bounce.
What is a page bounce?
A page bounce = One interaction - Users who land on a page and leave without any other interaction with other pages.
A bounce is always given a visit duration and time on page of 0, but this doesn't mean the user only spent seconds on the page. The time the user spent on page is not measured as there is no second interaction to measure it against.
So a page bounce doesn't tell us how long the user stays on the page before leaving or if they looked at any of the elements on our page.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce Rate = The percentage of sessions with only one user interaction.
It's worth noting at this point that a default session length for Google Analytics is 30 minutes.
With these definitions in mind we can start to see why a page might have a high bounce rate and begin to look at ways to reduce this figure and why in some cases a high bounce rate is to be expected.
Reducing page bounce rates
When working to reduce a pages bounce rate you need to work out why users are not interacting further with your website. Some common reasons for this could be:
- The ad or search listing creates different expectations for the user than those supplied by the landing page.
- Site only has one page (blog)
- Page doesn't clearly give the user calls to action or next steps
- Page designed as a one stop shop with very few other page options
Once you have a clear idea of the causes for your high bounce rate you can start to make changes to reduce it like improve your ads, search listings and page calls to action. If however you only have a single page site or very few pages then you should update your analytics tracking to track events on the page. This way you will get a clearer picture of what users are doing on your page.
For more help on improving your website success talk to our experienced marketing team on +44(0)1227 68 68 98.
