Ways for improving bounce rates.

Well, from a simple perspective, if they are drawn to click on something else on your site that takes them deeper, then they did not bounce. A button or a link that draws you to want to click on would be one of the most powerful things. For example, what if you I challenge you not to click on my signature link? Out of 10 people that read my post, I'll guarantee you some will click it. It's amazing the power of suggestion if you think about what moves people. If I say ...

Please, Please, I beg you. Don't click HERE!!!

or

Danger! Women in skimpy bikinis if you click this link

or

There is one thing most men are lacking that 95% can even guess what it is. Can you?

The elephant in the room still is what happens when they click and arrive!

Do you have tracking code on every page?

You may not be recording visits to other pages and this will skew your bounce rate figures.


.

If you have multiple pages of content, like articles for example, make sure that every page has navigation to lots of other pages. At the bottom of articles, put a related articles section. (If you use wordpress, I think there are plugins that make this easy.)

Also have a Most Popular section, and maybe a Most Recent section. And throughout your articles, where keywords appear in your text, make them hyperlinks to other relevant articles. Even if you think it doesn't make sense for a reader to leave the page in the middle of an article to go look at another page, do it anyway. They can bypass it if they want to, or maybe they'll click over and then click back. At least you get them to go exploring.

I made all these changes on one of my sites, and it had a huge effect on my bounce rates.

Also, pay attention to what keywords are bringing visitors to each page. Sometimes you'll find they're not landing on the most relevant page, given what they searched for, so you need to tweak your content to improve google's opinion of which page is most relevant. Another thing you can do in this situation is put a link near the beginning of the article that says something like, "Were you looking for X?" Or just, "Read about X." This works when you get lots of visitors landing in the wrong place, because of ambiguity.

-- Patey88

Thanks for the tips everyone I have decided to first go through alot of my content and try and improve bounce rates before i start focusing on adding video/more interactive media

Optimize your site for load time. You may be losing viewers who lost
interest because the site didn't load fast enough.

There's a lot to optimization, but graphics are a big drag so they
should be optimized.

You may want to use css sprites for some graphics: check out
the "SpriteMe" tool which installs in your browser. It's very cool.

Also, graphics can be squished smaller using Yahoo's free
"Smu****" tool.

A lot of good suggestions here.

I find bounce rate to be one of the most subjective metrics around. Obviously you want it to be as low as possible, but for there are so many variables that it's difficult to really know what is good and bad in many instances...

There are three key things that I think you should consider here:

1. Where is most of your traffic coming from? If it's from direct/organic search, you definitely have a problem. If it's from advertising (especially banners) you're not in that bad a position - I've worked on campaigns with big advertising budgets where a 55% bounce rate is seen as ok. If your traffic is from PPC, however, make sure that your landing pages are optimised for the keywords that people are searching for.

2. What kind of site is it? If it's a blog, where people often don't click into, then a higher bounce rate is expected, as people tend to just scroll down the page and then leave. If this is the case, check the time on site metric as this may give a better indication of interaction.

3. Don't look at one metric in isolation. Whilst a 70% bounce rate might not be good, you need to take into account the whole picture. There might be other metrics where the site is working really well.

Hope that helps, any more qu's feel free to DM me.

Hi,

What is your source of traffic? and is your visitors targeted? you can try everything you want but if your traffic is not targeted you will still have high bounce rates.

You can post your url here so I can check and give you some advice to get lower bounce rate if you feel that your traffic is targeted.

Surprising that no one seems to suggest that it might be a problem with the content!

Are you sure that people coming to your page are coming for the relevant content? I had a site which had amazing views for a couple of pages, but a huge bounce rate (60%+),

The problem?

Half of the users were coming from a search term not at all relevant to the content! That is, the keywords were 'right', but what was wrong was the 'context' in which the users perceived them on the pages.

Do check for that.

Regards,
Amod