I’m going to keep this blog simple. Because honestly, you don’t need to spend all night picking through information on the internet to find the basics on what a bounce rate is and how to use this knowledge to improve your website’s ranking. So here it is, everything you need to know about bounce rates. Which is surprisingly not much 🤷‍♀️

What is “Bounce Rate”?

A bounce is when a viewer visits a single page on your website, and then leaves without triggering any other click actions or requests. Basically, they get on your site and then leave.

A bounce rate is the percentage of all the visits to your website in which the viewer used only a single page and didn’t trigger more than one click action or request.

That’s it in a nutshell. A really small nut at that!

What’s High BR?

Typically having a high bounce rate isn’t a good thing. Most of our websites have landing pages that act as a gateway to access other pages full of resources, contact information, and more. So if viewers are hoping on your website and then leaving without triggering a click action, then your site isn’t doing it’s job sis 😬

However, if you do have a single page site, which I personally do not recommend or prefer for most business types, then a high bounce rate is normal. This is because you don’t have click actions to go onto other pages.

How Do I Lower My BR?

Okay, this is where it’s going to be hard for me to keep it short and simple. Because there is SO MUCH you can do! Here is what Google Support suggests, but put into that nutshell again. (Is this nut getting bigger? 😅)

The Audience Overview report provides the overall bounce rate for your site.

If your overall bounce rate is high, then you are going to have to dig a little deeper into channels, sources, pages, etc. Depending on what you find you will need to make changes to specific content, strategies and calls to action.

The Channels report provides the bounce rate for each channel grouping.

If a channel has a high bounce rate, then look more into your marketing for that particular channel. Maybe there is an ad there that isn’t relevant to your viewers causing them to bounce away.

The All Traffic report provides the bounce rate for each source/medium pair.

If your source/medium pair (source=origin of your traffic, medium=general category, ex:google/organic) is contributing to your high bounce rate, then it may be time to consider you websites design and content. Perhaps viewers are not finding what your SEO is leading them to believe they will find.

The All Pages report provides the bounce rate for individual pages.

If individual pages have high bounce rates, then dive deep into the design, language, calls to action and everything else that makes that webpage different, and more weak that the others.

How Do I Access My Analytics?

Google is full of all the information your will ever need! There are other programs that I love and use regularly, but Google is a great place to start! Here you can find how to access your analytics. And then refer back to this blog for a more simple nutshell version to help you get through understanding your websites br!

And as always, reach out for any virtual assistant and website building help!