Ideas and Technologies: The Power of Bounce Rate

What is a Bounce Rate?

It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

The Google Analytics is one of the best and free services offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

How Bounce Rate helps your site's niche?

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site.

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

"It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying."

On an ecommerce site, where the sole aim may be to sell products online, the bounce rate is a primary concern and useful measurement. Information sources and sites which drive the customer to make contact via email or phone may see much higher bounce rates. This may not be a bad thing as they are only viewing one page of the site.

How can you decrease your Bounce Rate?

While Bounce Rate helps you to study the success of your site, you and your site, on the otherhand, can affect the rate of bounce your visitors do. Below are some rules to decrease your site's bounce rate:

Make your blog user friendly. Your blog should be clean, orderly and appealing to the visitors. The text should be readable and the downloading should be fast. If you have an idea of what Web 2.0 means, you should be craving to minimize the use of high-weighing elements(flash animations, images, and applets) on your site/blog.
Write Quality and Relevant Contents. The articles published at your blog should be interesting and useful. Give your visitors the reason to stay longer at your blog.
Inter- linking articles. Offer your visitors more articles to read that are relevant to the landing page. This can be done by: linking to the other articles by using the relevant keywords within the article; and listing few related articles at the bottom of the article.
Proper SEO. In optimizing your blog or every pages of your blog for the search engines, you need to target the keywords that are relevant to the page being optimized.

For example, if you're targeting a specific keyword, “Pinay Scandal” on this case, make sure that the landing page(Learn Landing Page Optimization) contains relevant content because if the content is not related to the keywords used to find a page of your blog, most likely your visitors will immediately click the “Back” button of the browser to check for another websites.