People are typically confident when discussing their website’s statistics, yet a considerable proportion of individuals provide inaccurate data. A firm executive said some time ago, “I believe our homepage needs a comprehensive redesign.” “Our website has a 70% bounce rate. That’s what Google Analytics says.” Not precisely, no.
In this instance, the firm was a logistics company with a link to a shipment tracking website located on a separate domain that was accessible from the homepage. People visited the company’s homepage, clicked on the tracking link, and then left the homepage. Is that spring? Not at all That site visitor is conducting business with you. However, Google Analytics considers this as a bounce because the visitor landed on the home page and then departed the site immediately (albeit to another domain owned by the company).
What Does the Term “Bounce Rate” Mean?
Your bounce rate is the proportion of all sessions on your website that ended in a “bounce,” as defined by your Google Analytics settings.
A bounce occurs when a user views one of your pages, but no additional action or event signal is captured by Google Analytics before the user leaves your site. Scrolling is not counted as an action by default; only behaviors such as clicking a CTA button or menu item to visit another page or event clicks set in Google Analytics or Tag Manager, such as downloading files or watching a video, are counted as actions.
Do you have Bounce Rate Issues?
Now let us examine how you may tell whether you have your own bounce rate problems. Under acquisition for all traffic channels, you can typically go back at least three to four months, or even a year if it is a new account, and you can examine the bounce rate as a primary metric to determine if you have any major cliffs where the bounce rate drops from 50 percent to 3 percent.
When you see a significant decline in bounce rate (from 50 percent to 10 percent or below), this is an obvious illustration of a modification that had a direct influence on bounce rate, as this is not typical. You will not notice your content or anything else drop from 50 percent to 3 percent, therefore this is a typical indicator.
The second may be seen in our page views data. It is not always the case that duplicate page views are firing on each page, which contributes to the 2-3 percent aggregate bounce rate.
If your site’s overall bounce rate is between 15 and 20 percent, it is likely that you will have problems with individual pages. In this example, we are examining the Google merchandise shop, site content, and all pages, and then sorting by bounce rate, when we should be seeing the pages with the lowest bounce rates first. You will see that we have some pages with 0% bounce rates when there are just one or two admissions. This is typical. You will notice this because there is insufficient data, so what you will want to do is include a filter where we have more than 50 entrances, and if we find pages with a bounce rate of less than 10%, this indicates that there is an interactive GTM event tag firing or a duplicate page view event firing on these pages, as this is not typical.
How Does Google Analytics Calculate the Bounce Rate?
Let us return momentarily to theory.
Bounce rate of a web page = total number of bounces (when visitors departed) on a page (during a particular time) / total number of page entries (in the same period of time)
Example: 100 users visited page A, of whom 80 subsequently departed the site. 80 / 100 * 100 percent equals 80 percent for the bounce rate of a website.
The bounce rate of a website = total number of bounces across all pages (in a particular time period) / total number of entrances across all pages (in the same time period)
Yesterday, there were 4000 visits to the website, of which 3000 were unsuccessful. Three thousand divided by four thousand multiplied by one hundred percent equals seventy-five percent. When a visitor lands on a page, this is considered a page view. If the user navigates to a different page on your website, a new page view is recorded (which is counted as interaction). Great! Your website’s bounce rate decreased slightly as a result of two interactions.
Consider an alternative scenario. Your website comprises of really lengthy blog content (5000+ words). They are practical, and tourists enjoy them. However, after they have finished reading, they close the browser or go to a new tab.
Why? Probably because it required a considerable amount of time and effort to read the full blog entry. Now, they must do something different (take a break, go drink a coffee, or finish some tasks, or whatever).
In Google Analytics, this type of session would be classified as a bounce by default. 1-page view –> Exit. In actuality, this visitor read your entire blog content, clicked on many photographs to enlarge them, etc. There were exchanges; however, you failed to record them. By recording additional events (such as clicks, video player interactions, etc.) on your website, you may achieve a little more accurate bounce rate.
Session length will also fluctuate as a result of event tracking in Google Analytics. In GA, session length is computed as the difference between the times of the first and final hit (e.g., a pageview or an event). Consequently, if a visitor lands on a page, after 60 seconds completes a certain interaction, e.g., click (that is tracked by GA), and then leaves after another 30 seconds, Google Analytics will report that the session duration was 60 seconds because that is the time between the initial page view and the click.
In conclusion, the number of interactions (such as page visits or events) throughout a session influence both the bounce rate and session duration. These metrics will be altered if your Google Analytics installation is incorrect or if you count unneeded page elements as interactions.
Why are Incorrect Bounce Rates Generated in Google Analytics?
There are several actions that a visitor might take which will account for incorrect Bounce rates.
- Some e-commerce hits fire together with a pageview.
- Duplicate tracking code within the same webpage.
- Improper configuration of events (Eg: events such as product view, timer, etc. should be configured as non-interaction events).
- Server redirection (Auto redirecting users to another page from the landing page).
How Can I Decrease My Bounce Rate?
First, ask yourself: Is repair even necessary? Consider the principles in the preceding section and the rationale behind your statistics. Remember that Google does not utilize Analytics data, therefore it is OK if it is high for a valid cause.
If you are convinced that your bounce rate is negative — for example, if you have noticed a dramatic spike in the bounce rate on mobile devices, a short dwell time (time on page) for long content, or an increase following one of Google’s algorithm modifications – continue reading!
Optimize Your Images
Massive picture files on pages or in the design of the website itself are a primary source of delayed page loading, which, when paired with Google’s mobile-friendly ranks, may be devastating. Use WordPress plugins to compress pictures or manually downsize large images if your Google Analytics page timings or Page Speed Insights testing reveal slow performance. Studies reveal that 47% of the users want the web page to load within 2 seconds.
Enhance Your Teaser Text
A high bounce rate from social media or adverts is OK, unless visitors spend less than two seconds on the landing page. If your Google Analytics average session duration and average time on page data indicates that social media or ad traffic is leaving without reading your content, verify that your headlines, excerpts, and ad text are not deceptive.
Similarly, if you observe a high bounce rate and a short stay on page as a result of organic traffic, ensure that the page headers and meta descriptions convey precisely what the visitor will get. Absolutely no clickbait!
Improve your content
If your meta descriptions, page titles, and other teaser language are all excellent representations of your content, it is time to examine the content itself, or better yet, obtain an objective review from someone else in your business. A 2000-word article with a time on page average of 15 seconds indicates that nobody is reading it.
Ensure that the information is scannable, user-friendly (web-optimized), grammatically correct, and visually appealing.
Identify Broken Connections and Technical Mistakes
Regularly do technical audits with an SEO tool and analyze your site’s 404 log to identify broken links in your page text, broken pictures, and other bounce-causing mistakes. As previously said, ensure that your 404 page provides a content experience that motivates people to return and try again.
Create a More Robust UX
Assess pages with a high bounce rate from the perspective of your target audience. Whether it is due to unclear navigation, too many menu selections, too many menus, a lack of a clear path to content, too many pop-ups, or another annoyance to the visitor’s flow, these sites should be improved.
Using a heatmap tool like HotJar, you may do basic usability testing to determine which website components are working and which are not. A redesign of the website may be required to enhance the overall user experience.
Correct Channel-specific Bounce Rate Issues
Using Google Analytics, investigate the sources if the rate of referral traffic is excessive; you may have spam sites sending sessions your way, or a wrong link in an unrelated article, both of which need to be handled.
As previously said, high bounce rates from social media and advertising efforts should be measured against dwell time; secondly, improve the content quality of your posts and landing sites. A high bounce rate and low stay time for email visitors may also imply misleading call-to-actions or bad landing page content. A high bounce rate from direct traffic is practically hard to investigate; it might be the result of bookmarks, non-campaign email sharing, dark social (Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype), non-web documents (Word, PDF, Excel, etc.), or manually entering the URL. Checking all available criteria, including site speed, content quality, and user experience, is the best course of action.
Make Hyperlinks Open in a New Window
Always configure the link to open in a new tab whenever you connect to another website. Thus, your site’s tab will remain open on their device, requiring them to return. Leaving your site open in a tab enhances the likelihood that visitors will continue to read, click, and otherwise engage with your material, similar to retargeting advertisements that remind you of an item you added to your basket but did not purchase.
Set Up Event Tracking
You may configure Google Analytics to track a variety of actions, and actions naturally minimize the bounce rate. This provides a clearer picture of how many individuals are actually leaving because they were unhappy with the content or experience.
Conclusion
In any case, the point is that bounce rates should not be rejected, nor should they be intentionally decreased to satisfy your (or someone else’s) ego. By doing so (deliberately or unwittingly), you render the bounce rate useless while continuing to employ it.
Fixing Incorrect Bounce Rates will require the following steps:
- Install GA debugger.
- Check whether the same page is tracked twice.
- Check if events like impressions are sent as a non-interaction hit, if not it will lead to a low bounce rate.
- Remove duplicate tracking code, and configure events properly based on the interactions.
A bounce rate should continue to represent scenarios in which visitors depart a website without interacting with it. Tracking every eyeblink as an interaction is not the way to go.
In this article, we discussed a number of instances in which marketers/analysts seek to artificially decrease the bounce rate, as well as several examples in which this occurs accidentally/unintentionally. In addition, each scenario offered applicable recommendations for troubleshooting and repairing your applications. If you wish to join hands with a team of well-versed analysts who can help you reduce the bounce rate, contact Saras Analytics today.
