What causes bounce rate on your website?
Bounce Rate What is the Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is calculated using the length of time visitors spend on a single page. These are people who leave your website without visiting the second page. Google Analytics will not receive any trigger if the visitor does not skip the home page.
It should come as no surprise that the ultimate goal is to reduce bounce rates in order to improve conversion rates. Bounce rate is usually used to measure total traffic because a visitor who leaves your site from the landing page without further engagement leaves your site.
In order to provide you with information about the type of audience your site attracts, this data is used as a metric. In addition, it shows web pages that need to be updated.
The bounce rate of a website is calculated by dividing the total sessions per page by the total number of page visits.
41-55% is average, anything over 70% becomes disappointing, except for blogs and news sites.
And if your problem is less than that, there are some serious issues that you need to fix. So without further ado, let's get started.
1. Traffic bot
Bot traffic is non-human traffic and is also an addition to your website's metric.
When your landing page isn't performing well or experiences a high bounce rate on ads, bot traffic may be to blame.
These bots can be automated to click on ads and visit websites as target people. And imagine what? Up to 29% of ad clicks can be approved for the bot action.
And if you know this as a marketer, the 45% bounce rate won't bother you.
This is because you know that every visitor to the site or traffic is not real.
Bots are automatically triggered to copy, paste, or scan information from web pages.
Up to 52% of website traffic in 2016 was robot traffic and this was amazing.
This would have led to a large number of bounce rates for websites.
When running online ads, these bots can lead to lost advertising revenue.
It's the reason why you get false data when trying to measure the bounce rate of your website.
So keep in mind that not all site visits are human traffic.
2. Speed issues
Landing page load time can cause an increase in bounce rate. After all, our generation has an average attention span of 12-8 seconds.
With a 12-second interest period, it's essential that your landing page loads faster.
It's likely that the more pages a visitor sees, the more likely they are to add an item on the page to their cart.
This means that the ecommerce site that loads faster will get more items in the cart and this represents an increase in revenue.
But end users already have different connection speeds, especially on mobile devices.
It is therefore necessary to optimize the speed of your website for desktop as well as for mobile phones.
Large ecommerce companies are constantly improving the speed of their landing pages to gain an edge.
Amazon, for example, reports a 1% drop in sales when its pages load speed was 100 milliseconds slower than expected.
This means that the faster a website's pages load, the more time visitors spend clicking on different web pages.
And when visitors start browsing your website due to the fast page loading, the bounce rate decreases.
3. Poor user experience
Anyone who clicks on your ad is trying to solve a problem. Your landing page design should focus on solving their problem.
Avoid distractions like pop-ups on your landing page. Otherwise, web visitors will definitely leave the site.
Your landing page layout, colors, design, and ad writing may also be poorly optimized.
User experience is essential in converting a website visitor into a customer.
If your site is full of messy, incorrect, irrelevant, or boring content and design, your ad clicks will bounce.
This will result in a lower conversion rate.
An old landing page can tell a visitor a lot about your business, especially when you have inappropriate images.
4. Weak or no call to action
Once a visitor clicks on your ad and browses your landing page, they go through the decision-making process.
And when it's time to move on to the next step, you need a clear and precise call to action to make it happen.
Every element is important when optimizing the perfect call-to-action phrase.
Even the color of the text can double the click rate.
When users click on the call-to-action and move on to the next page, this reduces the bounce rate.
It's essential to have a call to action if you're trying to reduce your bounce rate.
If you don't show where your visitors should be heading next, they may immediately jump into your competitor's website.
5. Low-quality content
Dollars literally fly out of the window when visitors bounce back because of poor quality content or copywriting.
This may be a lack of readability or when your content is unclear and concise.
Poor quality landing pages – or lack of landing pages – often cause a high bounce rate. If the customer doesn't see what they're looking for quickly, they're more likely to bounce.
If they don't see what they want, it's easy to go to a competing website to solve the problem.
They may have a bad impression of the company's message and may be pushed to click off the landing page.
If the landing page content doesn't answer your visitors' questions, they may bounce back. And eventually, your conversion rate will be damaged.
6. Technical error
Maybe your javascript is faulty or visitors run into some kind of obstacle on your landing page.
Technical errors may be another reason for visitors to leave your landing page.
It's also possible that the website template is not loading, which can be a common problem with websites at times.
These errors can exist on your site without knowing what is really wrong.
If your site is too small, you can test it yourself.
Try accessing your landing page through different devices and browsers or you can use Google Search Control if you have a larger site.
7. Poorly targeted traffic
When you get the wrong visitors on your landing page, they can increase the bounce rate.
If your ad isn't shown to the right audience, it attracts wrong clicks to your landing page.
This can include poor targeting, bad ad placements, or not segmenting your campaigns according to customer intent.
Try to determine the target demographic, and get as accurate as possible. This will allow you to show your ads to people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.
General ad targeting can be costly and potentially lead to a high bounce rate.
How do we get a good bounce rate?
Perform a manual analysis of the landing page and select the page from your funnel that has the most bounce rate. Isolate it and perform a metrics analysis.
Look at the page design, go to the page like a visitor, select, and take the relevant notes.
In addition, you can apply these simple tips:
Get high-value traffic: Show your ads to the right audience, if you're using Google or Facebook PPC advertising campaigns, optimize your audience.
Write a relevant ad copy: Write ads that are relevant to your audience and narrow down your demographics deeply.
Use color representation maps: Heat maps show you what users do when they visit your website, you can see where visitors spend their time the most, and you can strategically add a call to action there.
Improve landing page speed: Test your speed on GTmetrix and keep improving unless you get a good result.
Invalid traffic filtering: Bots are an ongoing problem and require a technical solution. Fraud click prevention software is the best way to reduce your exposure to clicks from non-native traffic.
The Bottom Line
I've mostly discovered that reducing the bounce rate isn't a single endeavor.
The measurements you need to know before you can reduce the bounce rate require a series of operations.
These processes and solutions are not the same for every business.
What works for you may not work in another company. All in all, it's all about monitoring, tweaking, and improving over a period of time.