If you are running a website, for any purpose, bounce rate is one of the main factors you need to carefully watch in your Google Analytics data. If your bounce rate is really high, then it is time to be alarmed.
So, what is bounce rate? It is the percentage at which the visitors to your webpage leaves from the same page without navigating to any other pages in your site.
Bounce Rate Vs Exit Rate
Many people will get confusion on bounce rate with exit rate. Exit rate is the rate at which the user is leaving from a particular web page, even if they have visited multiple pages. It is generally used to determine the pages from which the users are leaving most. It is completely different from the bounce rate where the users generally leave the site immediately.
In most of the cases, high bounce rate is highly alarming. But it’s not the case in every scenario. If you are having a single page website, high bounce rate is a normal thing. But if you have multi page website, high bounce rate is not desired, as you’d like the users to engage with your website. If the bounce rate is higher than 70%, it is really higher than normal rate.
Having stated that high bounce rate is not ideal, very low bounce rate is also not desired. If it is way below 20%, then something is really wrong with your website or with your Analytics setup.
So, ideally, your bounce rate should be between 40-60%. This may vary according to the website. You can find the bounce rate for each channel and page in the Google Analytics.
The bounce rate for a website may increase due to many reasons. Here are some of the major reasons for the high bounce rate.
Page Speed
Page speed is one of the main factors that determines the bounce rate of a website. If a web page takes longer time to load than other websites, users will be frustrated and will leave your site immediately.
Pop-ups
There is a belief that pop-ups generally increase the conversions. It is true to an extend, only if it is relevant and timed perfectly. If a user sees a pop-up without seeing any content on your website, there is a high possibility for the user to leave your website immediately.
Website design
A poor website will affect your SEO performance in many ways. If the website design is not aesthetic enough, it gives a bad impression to the users. If the site navigation is not user friendly it is likely to impact in bounce rate.
The other important factor about website design is, it should be mobile friendly. If it is not responsive in mobile devices, bounce rate will be higher in mobile devices and it will affect overall performance.
Title Tag and Meta Description
Title tag and meta description are the first thing the user sees before visiting your site. If the content is not relevant to the title and description, it will not satisfy the user intention which will result in higher bouncing back to the SERP page.
Technical error
Your bounce rate can be high, if your page is blank or returning a 404 error page. This may be due to technical errors or if the redirection is not done properly.
Poor Content
Finally, the most important reason due to which your users are bouncing out is the poor content. If the content in your page doesn’t provide the answer to the user’s question, then it is obvious that the users will leave the page immediately.
Along with above mentioned major factors, bounce rate is also impacted by many other factors also. With the assistance of right SEO Company in Chennai, we can maintain it in the right percentage. It is really important for website owners to have an eye on bounce rate and try to reduce if it is increased above the critical level.
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