How’s that bounce rate going for your site? Having problems reducing it? Think it’s your site? It could be. It could also be that your site is just fine, and that you just need a little finess to suck those visitors in.
High Bounce Rate Cut Down By 25%
Take a look at my Twitter Toolbar page, screenshot below. Until last week it had a staggering 75-80% bounce rate. Was the page that poorly designed? For keeping visitors, yes. It was a bomb, and that was why I had a huge bounce. The page was and still continues to do wonderfully for what it was designed to do though. It was designed to get people to download the toolbar, and that is what most visitors do. In fact it averages 40 downloads a day, and the page only gets visited about 45-50 times a day.
Not satisfied with visitors simply downloading the toolbar, I felt the need to make something out of its traffic. I turned it into more traffic by reducing the bounce rate for the page, and I did it by getting them to read some of my posts. How did I do it? I added a simple link.
One Line Reduced the Bounce
Redesign of entire site? No way. By adding just one line of text with a link, I reduced the bounce for the page by more than 25%. Aggressive site changes, if not done right, could increase the bounce. I’m looking for calculated, killer, tweaks that can bring the bounce down one page at a time. Adding a simple link that related to the target audience did the trick.
Slow Down and Measure
It’s way to easy to go mixing things up, tweaking here, tweaking there. How are you going to measure all those changes? Pick and choose the changes you want to make. Look for the biggest problem areas, and only work on those. My Twitter Toolbar page had the highest bounce on the entire site, and it gets over a 1,000 uniques visitors a month alone. That had to be a fix. Making a change to just one page is also easy to measure. It’s additionally easier to figure out a way to reduce its bounce.
Journal Analytics
Feel free to say that I coined the phrase Journal Analytics. I wrote a post about it a while ago. Writing down the changes that you make to a site, and why you make them, could be your greatest friend. I like it soo much that I even started a new category on this site about it titled, A Month Ago.
If you log the changes you made to a site, and gave reasons to those changes two things happen. The first is the obvious, you have a way to look back, and see if it worked. The second reason appears the day you work on the change. It helps define why you are doing it. Sometimes we start doing things that could really just be a waste of time, and once we write down why we are doing it the picture becomes clear. Additionally, just giving something a try without much reasoning doesn’t usually work so well.
Bounce Rate Down, Confidence High
So when making your next change or changes to your site at least consider one thing before you start doing it. Consider how confident you are that it will work. Confidence usually coincides with reasoning.
Ali Imran (5)
Curtis (4)
Graphic Design Co... (1)
[...] Bounce Rate June 3rd, 2009 Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet BoxHere is a post I did on BWI, on how to reduce your bounce: Reducing Your Bounce Rate [...]
Reading my own post nearly a month later, I asked myself, did I really reduce the bounce by 25% by adding he link? The answer is yes. Besides researching the specific page history, I also looked up how visitors were getting there.
People using the search term “Twitter Toolbar” were landing on that page, and prior to the change were experiencing anywhere from 80-100%. Now they are averaging around 50%.
I also have a rather high bounce rate. I have added links to recent posts, random posts and everything i could think of.
I really need to decrease my bounce rate, but I am running out of ideas. I changed my theme recently, hopefully that will help.
I checked out your blog. Blogs are known to have a pretty high bounce, but I see a couple of things that might be making your visitors bounce. First take a look at your site using 1024 monitor setting (what most people use). Your site looks like a giant video ad on first impression.
The other item is the fact that you need a tag line or introduction message. New visitors need to have a clue about what your blog is about before they spend time reading it.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the suggestions. I am toying around the the featured content slider. I added it in order to attrack attention to some of the best content on the blog and hopefully convince the reader to hang around longer.
Good call. I typically use Google Analytics to track visitors in addition to a custom analytics server package. Reducing bounce rate is a top priority for any site (or at least should be).
Awesome to see! Did you only try this on the one page, or your entire website?
I normally have a pretty high bounce rate also. Maybe I should conside such a one-liner.