What is the bounce rate and why is it important?

Bounce rate might sound like something fun, but it is a serious matter for marketers and website owners because it reflects the visitors’ interaction on your websites. 

Are visitors entering your site and exiting right away? This means that they did not find the information they were looking for and that is bad for business.

But what if you have a landing page? Or a one-page website? None of them would give the visitor other pages to interact. Is this good or bad?

To keep it short and simple: when the bounce rate goes high it is bad and when it goes low it is good.
Here are some reasons that might lead to a high bounce rate:

• slow loading pages
• low-quality content
• bad user experience
• technical problems
• or all of these mixed together

But remember there is no correct bounce rate! Everything is contextual as it depends on the industry you are in, the website type and many other factors. See the picture below for some general stats to use as a benchmark.

Besides the industry or website type, please note that the bounce rate may be higher from mobile users — so make sure you offer your visitors a friendly and engaging mobile experience.

Multiple companies demonstrated that you basically have less than 15 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, so you have to make the best out of it. The strategy for lowering the bounce rate is to make your website more appealing and engaging.  

Check out these 3 basic ideas meant to improve your bounce rate:

Readability is important not only for SEO but is also essential for user experience. Try to offer your visitors smooth sailing throughout your website. If the visitor finds your content hard to understand he or she will bounce immediately.

When it comes to Call-to-Action, the secret is to leave users wanting more! Here is an example: Let’s say you offer free trials and you have a button such as ”Sign Up” or “Register”. Use instead “Register for free” or “Try it for free”. Or maybe you have multiple blog posts: you can play around with buttons like “Read more” or some funky phrases. Play around a bit with the CTAs and see what makes users click, both literally and figuratively.

Everybody enjoys a good story, no question about it!
And if readers can relate to it, there is an even better chance of catching their attention. So start thinking about what makes people come to your website. Do they want to learn something new? Are they searching for a product or a solution? Now tell your story the way they want to hear it!

So take a leap of faith, or a bounce of faith, and try to improve your website’s bounce rate. Also, do not forget to check out our blog article on how to improve web traffic and tell us in the comments on how this worked out for you!