A month ago and a few days, I mentioned how August would be about attacking the bounce. I had completed the fix my site analytical analysis using July’s numbers, and the bounce rate was my worse offender. Doing the same using August numbers I am now after page views per visitor. So here is what I did in August, and how it effected my site.

August = No Bounce

On my calendar I had work on bounce rate for every day of August. I think I saw it three or four times. I was actually pretty disappointed in the amount of time I spent working on it, and was hoping to make a substantial gain on this. The good news is though, I did three things right away in August, and they appear to be helping. So much so, that it is no longer a top priority based on Septembers analysis.

The three main things I attacked was the main offenders (home page, and Twitter Toolbar download page), the format of the home page, and the polls I was running on this site.

What I Did, and Its Effect

Main Offenders

The main offenders, the pages that had the most traffic with room for improvement, were my first targets. My worst page is the Twitter Toolbar page. The page actually works very effectively, with nearly 50% of all visitors downloading the toolbar. The problem is though, they leave after they download. Got to put a stop to that.

I had tried adding links close to the download link in the past, and it helped. This time I tried it another way though. I moved the links farther down, made the download link more prominent, changed the wording a little bit above it, and the end results was a 5% decrease in bounce. The reason it decreased I believe was due to the fact that I did a better job capturing the target audience that landed there. Not everyone that downloads leaves the site. I now get more downloads and more page views by simply making the page more clear, and with less distractions. This was my biggest influencer that I know of so far, read about my polls farther down on this post.

The second most offending page to the bounce rate was the home page. This I tackled by making a few formatting changes.

Format

Trying to reduce my bounce on my home page I did several things. Many of them were just minor cleanups of code and style, but the key change was the fact that I added thumbnails to the teaser of every post on the home page. Pictures work wonders, and my bounce rate reduced by 4% on this page compared to July’s numbers. Writing this, I just reminded myself of another way to improve on this. I completely forgot to make the thumbnails link to the post. This could create a ton of back and forth traffic, and since this months goal is now about increasing page views per visitor I could have a great start!

Half way through August I made some more changes to the format, and comparing the last two weeks of August to the first two weeks I saw another 4% drop in bounce. I killed off the mybloglog javascript I had, I removed category links (leaving them on the post page only), and I removed the fat line breaks. Less, less, and less equaled less bounce. This reminds me a little of my toolbar page, and it’s removal of junk.

Polls!

Everyone knows how great polls are, right? It’s what I always thought anyhow. I never even bothered to see how they were doing until the 24th of August. Here is why I killed off my polls on this site. Basically, they stunk. It’s still to early to tell how this is working, but I don’t miss them. I have also not heard one complaint about deleting them from the sidebar. Comparing this week to last, bounce is down 7% site wide though. Less javascript, and less stuff visitors didn’t care about.

Have a devastating way to reduce the bounce? Without mentioning having a list of related posts below (I’ve seen too much of that lately), let us know!

Like this post? Get usability and design tips delivered by email straight to you. Full feed articles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.

5 Comments - Post Yours