Yesterday I posted about how I will be working on reducing my bounce rate for the next month. One of the first methods I plan on doing this is by figuring out what are my most offending pages. Looking not just for that high bounce rate, but looking at the total number of visitors that bounced.

At First Glance

At first glance I found a couple of easy ones to fix, and dismissed one page because the the bounce rate that was relatively low. I am looking for easy fixes right now. What I forgot to do though, was to compare the  new visitors with the returning visitors on those pages. What I found was that my relatively low bouncing page was in disguise.

After Comparing New and Returning

By looking at this particular offending page it had a semi-high bounce rate of 55%. I had worse, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, at least at first. I later came back to that page, and this time I did the comparison.

By going to Google’s analytical data for the page, I used the segment feature (shown above) to select new and returning visitors, and that is where I found my secret bouncers. The page was doing fine for the regulars, but it was/is killing the new visitors with an average 72% bounce rate. Yikes! That page was fith on my list. Now it’s first! You have to dig around a little extra to find the real trouble makers.

Now I have an easy page to reduce my sites overall bounce rate, and a way turn more new visitors into regulars. Time to do some editing!

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