The Truth behind High Bounce Rates

You may have encountered it on your Google Analytics page, but most of us pay no heed to the bounce rates tab. This in fact, is something you absolutely need to take note of. High bounce rates could indicate dangerous levels of your website’s ‘skip-ability’.

What are bounce rates?

The amount of time a user spent on one of your web pages, in a nutshell. This could mean that people landed on your webpage by accident, or they entered it on purpose, but were put off by something and left immediately. High bounce rates may be undesirable for exactly that reason. Paying attention to your bounce rates is vitally important for your SERPs as this is one of Google’s quality indicators for websites.

What Results in a High Bounce Rate

Too little text. Add some meat to your homepage; make it explanatory and inviting without being too formal or wordy.

Misrepresentation. When the page title or call to action does not correspond with what the user expected when they clicked on your link during a Google search.

AdWords. False advertising – this ties in with misrepresentation. Definitely something you would want to avoid when building up credibility. Being targeted to your desired audience is better than having a lot of clicks, so be mindful of your keywording.

Banner ads. Too many banner advertisements are off-putting. We have migrated into a generation which has a general dislike of advertising.

The first glance factor. A website’s general appearance can make or break its likability. If a website is of poor quality with regards to design and layout, most users will not even spare it a second look. If your website’s first impression does not meet with the high expectations of your audience, your bounce rate increases.

Clutter. If users need to conduct a high-end search within their search results, or even just search for obvious information (such as contact details) on your website, they will quickly abort their mission.

A mobile friendly website. Many people search the web on their mobiles and if your site is not optimised accordingly, they will skip it. There are few things as annoying as landing on your desired webpage and you can view the content immediately. Be wary of pop-ups, on mobile they are a special grievance.

Other factors to consider are your website’s speed, auto play video or audio, unnecessary forms, forced downloads and live chat. It is best to steer clear of all, except the latter. Live Chat systems do incredible things for websites – see more in our article The Power of Live Help Systems for Websites.

A bounce rate of 50% is not necessarily bad – anything much higher than that should attract your attention. At the end of the day, bounce rates do not prophesise doom and gloom for your website. They may very well indicate that you are attracting the correct audience and they quickly find exactly what they are looking for. But if your website is guilty to any of the annoyances mentioned above, it would be wise to re-evaluate your website’s formatting.