One of the most effective ways to know if your website is being well received by the flow of people who access it is by monitoring a very important indicator in Digital Marketing: the bounce rate!
The higher the rejection rate, the greater the negative impact on the positioning of your content, affecting the display of your business among search results and also your sales.
So here you will learn the essentials to:
- Fascinate your ideal audience (those who buy from you);
- Conquer Google’s algorithms;
- And nip your bounce rate in the bud!
What is bounce rate and its importance
The bounce rate is a Digital Marketing indicator that points to the percentage of people who leave a page on your website, or an article on your blog, before even interacting or exploring other pages of yours!
See Google’s own definition, presented in Google Analytics 4:
“Percentage of unengaged sessions. For example, if someone visits your site, reads the content on the home page for less than 10 seconds, and then leaves without triggering any events or moving to other pages or screens, that session counts as a bounce.Engaged sessions have a minimum duration of 10 seconds, at least 1 conversion event, or at least 2 page or screen views. If the person does not have an engaged session (i.e., does not meet any of the required criteria), Google Analytics counts the session as a bounce.”
Unlike the exit rate (which indicates how many people are leaving the page after browsing it for a while), the bounce rate works as an alert that something in the display of your content is not right!
There can be many reasons for a high bounce rate, but they usually involve:
- Page display errors or an above-normal delay in loading the page (a point to be resolved with Technical SEO);
- Problems with correct formatting within the content (a job for On Page SEO );
- Or even displaying the wrong content to the target audience your company wants to reach!
Have you noticed how practically all the indications of a problem with your website, or its content, relate to incompatibility between:
- Your audience’s expectations;
- What about the content published (or distribution channels ) by your brand?
Since first impressions are lasting impressions (especially when it comes to selling online), the rejection rate does much more than just point out flaws.
The bounce rate also gives you the opportunity to meet a series of demands that have not yet been explored by you (or your competitors) in the market!
This is because a large part of what makes Digital Marketing so profitable for businesses like yours is the power to use the most modern technologies (such as artificial intelligence and automation) to:
- Collect data about your ideal audience;
- Know and categorize them into different groups, made up of leads with similar behaviors, needs and interests;
- And trigger extremely personalized campaigns, with the aim of being assertive for each of these different groups and obtaining the highest possible engagement rate from this investment!
Based on the rejection rate, it is possible to deduce from the facts (and not from guesswork):
- What kind of questions your audience is looking for answers to;
- What is the best way to present these answers (in relation to the format of content published on a website, social network, or even via Email Marketing);
- And at what stage of familiarization with your brand (i.e., at what stage of the purchasing journey the customer is), present what type of content, to nurture the relationship that turns into a sale!
All this information comes from a simple calculation that I will teach you below!
How to calculate website bounce rate?
Learning how to calculate the bounce rate of a page on your website is easy! You need to:
- Divide the number of visits to the page you are analyzing;
- By the total number of visits to your website;
- And multiply the result by 100%!
Using a formula to visualize the calculation, this rate can be found as:
Bounce rate = (number of visits to a single page ÷ total number of visits to the website) x 100%
A dummy page, just to serve as an example, could have:
- A number of visits of 50,000 people;
- In contrast to the 200,000 people visiting the entire site;
- Resulting in a 25% bounce rate!
But is a 25% rate high?
To answer this question, you need to go beyond the numbers: you need to interpret what they symbolize in the specific context of your case!
How to interpret bounce rate
As I said before, a high bounce rate is not good: it is usually a sign that something is interfering with a visitor’s experience on your business’s website!
This is why a low bounce rate is generally positive, as it indicates that users are:
- Finding the content they are looking for;
- Coming across materials relevant to their awareness;
- And engaging with this content.
A high bounce rate points to the opposite:
- Your posts are not relevant to the majority of the audience you are attracting;
- There is a problem with the loading time or display of the page, making it unreadable or unreadable;
- Either the quality of your posts is not yet up to the task of expressing your business expertise, or the ways in which you can make your future client’s life easier!
The good side of all this is that even a very high bounce rate can be reduced at any time by understanding which variables really matter for the success of your business on the Internet.
More than that, these variables also help you identify what bounce rate might be considered common or acceptable for your brand — and which numbers you need to worry about!
I’ll talk about this below.
What is an acceptable bounce rate for a website?
Following the previous example, the rate of 25% can be considered high or low: it will depend on the context!
If I compare this rate to the average rejection rate of 3% in the industry in which I am competing for a space, for example, 25% could be considered a high value!
But don’t get too excited about these fictitious values, as bounce rates close to 0% are extremely rare — almost impossible to achieve!
Even though there is no universally accepted average bounce rate as the official one, many marketing professionals consider a variation between 30% and 45% to be normal.
According to Hotjar, the average bounce rates that are considered acceptable vary across different sectors or channels, take a look:
- 20% to 45% for e-commerce and retail;
- 25% to 55% for Business to Business (B2B) businesses;
- 30-55% for lead generation websites ;
- 35-60% for non-ecommerce content sites;
- 60-90% for landing pages;
- 65-90% for dictionaries, portals and blogs.
However, when it comes to building or executing an Internet sales strategy for your particular business, it will be the context that will dictate whether a bounce rate is acceptable or not for you!
The miracles brought by the rapid technological development of Digital Marketing allow you to analyze bounce rates at the level of:
- From a media into a content;
- From the page that displays such content;
- From the website itself that brings together all the pages;
- Or the industry in which the site is being discovered and accessed!
With the bounce rate in hand, the next step is:
- Compare it with other indicators that help justify the size of the number;
- In addition to estimating whether it is high or low in the success parameters of its actions;
- Especially compared to the resources invested to make them happen!
Some of the most commonly used indicators to understand the impact of your current bounce rate on the results you need to extract from your campaigns are:
- Average time on page, which shows how much time a person spends consuming content on your website;
- The conversion rate , showing how many people stop just consuming content and start taking action on a proposal or offer presented by your business;
- And user behavior in both cases (and many others).
As long as you focus on providing a smooth browsing and consumption experience for your visitors, you’re halfway to reaching the top of Google search results!
I say this because, of all the factors you can manipulate to reduce your bounce rate, the one that offers the best cost-benefit (in the short and long term) is making your user happy and satisfied.
If you can ensure that a visitor leaves your site with a solution to a challenge or a fresh perspective on a desire, you’ll ensure that you make the best first impression possible — one that actually converts into a sale!
Factors that influence bounce rate
Internet content is the only way for a company to communicate en masse, at a distance and, at the same time, with countless people interested in what the brand has to sell!
Since content is created to communicate something to someone, it is expected that the person consuming these publications on the other side of the screen is a human.
With this certainty clarified, any page that takes a long time to load, any confusing navigation and any cluttered design will have a repellent effect on your potential customers!
In addition to these more obvious details, problems with the site’s architecture, the lack of optimization for mobile devices and even the author’s inexperience in signing the publication of the content also weigh on someone’s decision to abandon your page and never return.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel!
The best antidote to rejection is engagement , and in the next topics, I show you how to do that!
How to reduce the bounce rate, turning it into engagement?
Digital Marketing seeks to understand the audience because this is the easiest way to trigger action in them!
To spark action is to engage, it is to make someone react to what is being communicated!
The act of leaving a page before exploring it is a reaction in itself. An action is triggered by:
- Curiosity for an answer;
- Need for immediate understanding;
- And anticipation (or the search) for novelty!
It is for these reasons that I reinforce that, to reduce your bounce rate, the least you need to do is not frustrate your user’s experience by:
- Deliver what he needs;
- At the time he needs it;
- Presented in a way he understands.
The step-by-step guide below takes a deeper dive into these concepts, but with a spoiler: the difference really lies in the quality of your pages!
1. Fast loading pages
No matter how promising your solution is, no brand is special enough for a user to wait for a long loading time!
To avoid increasing your bounce rate due to such nonsense, apply SEO strategies, both On Page and technical, on all your pages, and don’t forget to:
- Compress images to reduce their size without affecting their quality too much;
- Reduce the number of unnecessary scripts loading along with the page;
- Use website hosting services that are fast and reliable;
- And consider implementing a caching system (of records) to avoid unnecessary loading and speed up the display of the website.
2. Intuitive navigation
The easier it is to navigate your website, the less frustrated a visitor will feel, as the chances of them finding what they are looking for through intuitive navigation are much greater.
I mean that:
- Your menus, buttons and links need to be clear and well structured;
- Your categories and subcategories need to be easy to identify and find;
- And all pages need to be connected to each other not only in terms of design and stylistic coherence, but also in terms of themes and textual communications!
3. Responsiveness
When we say that a website is “responsive”, what we are seeing is that the website is able to adapt to different screen sizes.
Responsiveness will ensure that your content will be displayed correctly both in 4K cinema projections and on a cell phone or tablet screen!
In addition to keeping your platform functional, easy to navigate, and minimally pleasing to the eye, you eliminate all accessibility issues that tend to increase bounce rates by:
- Make fonts (letters) remain legible at any zoom level;
- Prevent buttons from appearing that are impossible to click in certain aspects (such as in landscape or portrait mode);
- Prepare your website for voice navigation by applying alternative texts to visual elements, taking your On Page SEO and Technical SEO strategy into consideration!
It is essential to test responsiveness on different devices to make sure that all links and buttons are working. This way, you won’t lose sales or increase your bounce rate because someone wants to buy from you and can’t!
This is the worst (and most common) kind of irony on the Internet.
To ensure the responsiveness of your website, you can hire a Digital Marketing agency like Enjoy Minder, which has experience in creating hyper-intuitive website and application structures for real people!
4. Quality content
It’s not just impeccable grammar or formatting that turns any content into quality content. What makes a publication a reference is relevance:
- What your audience gives to the topic you are dealing with;
- And the relevance you give to explaining topics that are valuable to your audience !
Invest in creating content with different media formats (text, images, videos and the like) aiming to increase engagement with the public by even awakening an emotion in them.
Pay attention to how you express your solutions and insert a bit of storytelling to distill your brand’s expertise in an original way — uncopyable by your competitors!
The key to winning your audience’s hearts with content that can reduce your bounce rate forever is to decide to publish less about what is important only for your company’s success, and create content around the questions (and success) of your future customers.
5. Encourage actions
Since the mission is to convert rejection into engagement by triggering an action in your visitors, you need to use calls to action!
Known in Digital Marketing as CTAs, they are:
- Short and attractive requests or proposals;
- Spread across the pages of your website;
- And guiding your visitors to take action in some way!
The best way to encourage someone to do something for you is to ask them, so use CTAs to:
- Reduce your bounce rate by taking your visitors directly to the topics that matter most to them;
- And increase your conversion rate by offering personalized proposals to different niches within your target audience!
6. Improve traffic
In addition to preventing people who bounce from your site from bouncing out of your reach, investing in publishing and distributing valuable content improves the quality of organic traffic that reaches your brand.
With more people discovering your business precisely because of what it does best, the rejection rate plummets because your company becomes part of the solution and the consumer’s desire!
This flow of people approaching the brand more aware of what it offers brings segmentation data capable of multiplying the effectiveness of your campaigns.
The increase in traffic quality is reflected both in the reduction of the bounce rate and in the reduction of wasted resources by your sales team when selling to those who really want to buy.
7. Constant testing
Finally, use A/B testing to evaluate the best positioning, the most effective colors, and even the most attractive CTAs displayed on your website!
In A/B testing, you create an identical copy of the page you want to test and change just one element on that copy.
You then serve the original page to one half of your visitors, and the modified copy to the other half.
After a certain period of time, you analyze which page performed best and merge them into the best version.
From there, you can A/B test again, changing just one more element of the new copy to discover the anatomy of a perfect page:
- One that reduces the bounce rate;
- And convert curious people into buyers!
Make irresistible content!
When it comes to selling more online, embracing rejection is a rite of passage: it opens the doors to understanding that it is the public’s success that really matters!
If your audience wins, you win — and your bounce rate is no longer a problem as a result.
As you saw:
- Bounce rate indicates the percentage of people who leave a page on your website without checking out the published content or other pages;
- Calculating the bounce rate is equal to dividing the number of visits to the analyzed page by the total number of visits to the site, and multiplying the result by 100%;
- Interpreting a bounce rate as high or low, acceptable or not, will depend on the contexts related to your business and its market;
- And the most cost-effective way to decrease bounce rate while increasing conversion rate is to focus on customer success — not your company’s ego!
Embracing rejection is another way of saying that your brand needs to be humble enough to listen to what’s urgent for your audience.
After all, that’s the only way you’ll be relevant to him — by helping him overcome a challenge!
Digital Marketing acts as the bridge that connects this relationship of genuine utility to the achievement of financial objectives that keep the business alive — and growing!
To find out how healthy your brand’s Digital Marketing is, or to discover personalized solutions that reduce your bounce rate, I recommend the Free Diagnosis here at Enjoy Minder!
In no time, you’ll have a map of your next sales success opportunities — and a real chance to make them a reality!
