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Website bounce rate

by Numatik
17 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi Folks

I am slightly concerned with my bounce rate for my artist (music) website. It's telling me that it is 77.22%? I understand that this is quite bad and I am new to web design.

If you need a link to take a look for any advice I can post it on this thread.

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Steve (Numatik)
#bounce #rate #website
  • Profile picture of the author ilee
    I can take a look for you. Is all your music and everything they need on the homepage?
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  • Profile picture of the author Numatik
    Yes my music is on the pages although I am just adding more Soundcloud links as we speak
    http://www.pentaprism-music.com

    Thanks
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    • Profile picture of the author Honest Tune
      My two pennies:
      The site is very slow loading; find a plug-in to reduce load time, wp cache is good.

      The logo in the header is way too large, IMO. I would take it down some in size.

      The navigation in the right is positioned in a totally odd place. I would move it up to a place where the user expects it to be. Either below primary or on left hand side.
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      • Profile picture of the author kaytav
        Originally Posted by Honest Tune View Post

        My two pennies:
        The site is very slow loading; find a plug-in to reduce load time, wp cache is good.

        The logo in the header is way too large, IMO. I would take it down some in size.

        The navigation in the right is positioned in a totally odd place. I would move it up to a place where the user expects it to be. Either below primary or on left hand side.
        These are some great tips. I would also suggest to ad some music ads, which would help your website get some clicks...
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        • Profile picture of the author Numatik
          Originally Posted by kaytav View Post

          These are some great tips. I would also suggest to ad some music ads, which would help your website get some clicks...
          Thanks for this but do you mean music ads from sites like Clickbank etc?
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        • Profile picture of the author ilee
          Originally Posted by kaytav View Post

          These are some great tips. I would also suggest to ad some music ads, which would help your website get some clicks...
          Do you understand what bounce rate is? You literally spam so much around here!

          Main thing is probably a call to another page in the opening paragraph by putting a link there or something. I can see you have a link to Plastik Philosophy which may be where a lot of your visitors are going. Ideally to lower bounce rate you'll want try to funnel the visitor to another page on your site first before they get to the link to the external site.

          Maybe instead of having the actual sound cloud music player on the homepage, just have a link to another page with the songs on.

          I can't guarantee any of the above will work, but it's worth trying things out. Just remember the most important thing is probably user experience, so make sure you don't sacrifice that too much for a slightly lower bounce rate
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          • Profile picture of the author Numatik
            Originally Posted by ichl13 View Post

            Do you understand what bounce rate is? You literally spam so much around here!

            Main thing is probably a call to another page in the opening paragraph by putting a link there or something. I can see you have a link to Plastik Philosophy which may be where a lot of your visitors are going. Ideally to lower bounce rate you'll want try to funnel the visitor to another page on your site first before they get to the link to the external site.

            Maybe instead of having the actual sound cloud music player on the homepage, just have a link to another page with the songs on.

            I can't guarantee any of the above will work, but it's worth trying things out. Just remember the most important thing is probably user experience, so make sure you don't sacrifice that too much for a slightly lower bounce rate
            That's great advice thanks for this. I will apply these methods and see what happens.

            I understand that bounce rate is the percentage of time that a visitor stays on your site before they head off to another site etc?

            That's why I was slightly worried that it's almost 80% where there would be critical issues with the website.
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            • Profile picture of the author paulgl
              I would never worry about bounce rate. How much money is
              the site making? That's the only thing that matters. People
              can surf in and click an adsense ad. I'd love that, and so would
              google.

              If I find what I needs on a site right away, why should I stick around?

              I would even argue the opposite. If people cannot find what they
              are looking for, right away, your site is too concerned with keeping
              people around.

              You can look at bounce rate two ways. The tips about a fast
              loading page are okay, it's just that this is 2013 and I cannot
              fathom such normal things really affecting load time for the
              average person. If this was 1996 dial-up, maybe.

              Having a site too cluttered where people cannot find a thing,
              may actually improve your bounce rate. But a lousy visitor
              experience.

              I'd rather have someone surf in, find what they want, click
              an ad, tell their friends, instead of using up bandwidth
              lollygagging around.

              Paul
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              • Profile picture of the author yukon
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                Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

                You can look at bounce rate two ways. The tips about a fast
                loading page are okay, it's just that this is 2013 and I cannot
                fathom such normal things really affecting load time for the
                average person. If this was 1996 dial-up, maybe.

                You would be surprised how many people still have slow internet connections. I have AT&T DSL & it is slower than a mofo, half the time I can't even load the Youtube Index page, anything flash related usually bogs the connection down.

                Where I'm located doesn't have any other option, even 3g mifi is spotty, 4g isn't an option.

                If I land on a page that takes a long time to load, I'll bail, I'm not sitting there all day waiting for a page to load. OPs page loads pretty slow because of the soundcloud players.

                OP, make sure every single external link opens in a new window/tab (target="_blank"), that might help reduce bounce rate & is more user friendly. If traffic clicks on a single itune link in your sidebar, what If they want to listen to the other two itune links in the sidebar, they'll have to hit the browser Back button in order to return to your page. If the external links on your page open in a new window/tab the traffic will always have your page open, which could lead to better earnings.

                Only use (target="_blank") for external links, using that code on internal links is a poor user experience considering most internal pages will already have site navigation links they can click on.
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                • Profile picture of the author Numatik
                  Originally Posted by yukon View Post

                  You would be surprised how many people still have slow internet connections. I have AT&T DSL & it is slower than a mofo, half the time I can't even load the Youtube Index page, anything flash related usually bogs the connection down.

                  Where I'm located doesn't have any other option, even 3g mifi is spotty, 4g isn't an option.

                  If I land on a page that takes a long time to load, I'll bail, I'm not sitting there all day waiting for a page to load. OPs page loads pretty slow because of the soundcloud players.

                  OP, make sure every single external link opens in a new window/tab (target="_blank"), that might help reduce bounce rate & is more user friendly. If traffic clicks on a single itune link in your sidebar, what If they want to listen to the other two itune links in the sidebar, they'll have to hit the browser Back button in order to return to your page. If the external links on your page open in a new window/tab the traffic will always have your page open, which could lead to better earnings.

                  Only use (target="_blank") for external links, using that code on internal links is a poor user experience considering most internal pages will already have site navigation links they can click on.
                  Thanks for the advice on Soundcloud players. It may be one of the reasons why the page is slightly slow on loading. I will look into this when I get back onto the WP admin and see if I can sort this out.

                  I am also going to be offering free downloads of sample banks for softsynths and also tut videos of studio sessions as the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) scene is huge in Europe and the USA.
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                  • Profile picture of the author yukon
                    Banned
                    Originally Posted by Numatik View Post

                    Thanks for the advice on Soundcloud players. It may be one of the reasons why the page is slightly slow on loading. I will look into this when I get back onto the WP admin and see if I can sort this out.

                    I am also going to be offering free downloads of sample banks for softsynths and also tut videos of studio sessions as the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) scene is huge in Europe and the USA.
                    I have 3 download sites, my best earner has a bounce rate of 40% with 7 page views per unique traffic.

                    One thing I do is put the file inside a zip file, inside the zip file is:
                    • Read Me.txt
                    • Internet shortcut link pointing back to my site
                    • Actual file traffic wants to download

                    The internet shortcut inside the zip file works good for getting repeat/direct traffic. Google sees the traffic as direct traffic coming into the site, they didn't click a link on another website/page, they didn't use a search engine to find me. As far as Google knows the traffic coming from the internet shortcut has manually typed my web address into their browser like people do when going to an authority site.

                    People that download the zip file will click the internet shortcut out of curiosity.

                    It's also a good idea to send the internet shortcut traffic (offline traffic) to an internal page for tracking/upsells or at the very least use something like hxxp://domain.com#mp347, where #mp3 identifies the traffic is offline & clicking a link inside your zip file, where 47 identifies the mp3 number (ex: 47th blog post).

                    Google treats jump links as the same url, so these are the same URLs:
                    • hxxp://domain.com
                    • hxxp://domain.com#mp347

                    The # symbol represents a jump-link, jumping to a specific part of the page, like Wikipedia has for the TOC links at the top of most of their article pages. Even If you don't have the page setup to actually jump anyplace, the default behavior is the jump-link URL will jump to the top of the web page, like a normal URL without tracking.
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                    • Profile picture of the author Numatik
                      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

                      I have 3 download sites, my best earner has a bounce rate of 40% with 7 page views per unique traffic.

                      One thing I do is put the file inside a zip file, inside the zip file is:
                      • Read Me.txt
                      • Internet shortcut link pointing back to my site
                      • Actual file traffic wants to download

                      The internet shortcut inside the zip file works good for getting repeat/direct traffic. Google sees the traffic as direct traffic coming into the site, they didn't click a link on another website/page, they didn't use a search engine to find me. As far as Google knows the traffic coming from the internet shortcut has manually typed my web address into their browser like people do when going to an authority site.

                      People that download the zip file will click the internet shortcut out of curiosity.

                      It's also a good idea to send the internet shortcut traffic (offline traffic) to an internal page for tracking/upsells or at the very least use something like hxxp://domain.com#mp347, where #mp3 identifies the traffic is offline & clicking a link inside your zip file, where 47 identifies the mp3 number (ex: 47th blog post).

                      Google treats jump links as the same url, so these are the same URLs:
                      • hxxp://domain.com
                      • hxxp://domain.com#mp347

                      The # symbol represents a jump-link, jumping to a specific part of the page, like Wikipedia has for the TOC links at the top of most of their article pages. Even If you don't have the page setup to actually jump anyplace, the default behavior is the jump-link URL will jump to the top of the web page, like a normal URL without tracking.
                      Fantastic idea with the zip files! I will add that to a list of tasks
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                      • Profile picture of the author yukon
                        Banned
                        Originally Posted by Numatik View Post

                        Fantastic idea with the zip files! I will add that to a list of tasks
                        The cool thing about giving away something free inside a zip file is, that link will be on the traffics computer for a long time as long as they find the actual download (mp3 or whatever) useful.

                        It's also possible the traffic will share the zip file with other people which could bring in more unique traffic that could potentially click the internet shortcut inside the zip file, then land on your live webpage which could lead to a new sale.

                        It took me a lot of trial & error to fine tune that zip file traffic process, I've been happy with it for a few years now. Keep the content inside the zip file to a min., that way the traffic isn't overloaded with too many options (just the basics).
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              • Profile picture of the author Numatik
                Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

                I would never worry about bounce rate. How much money is
                the site making? That's the only thing that matters. People
                can surf in and click an adsense ad. I'd love that, and so would
                google.

                If I find what I needs on a site right away, why should I stick around?

                I would even argue the opposite. If people cannot find what they
                are looking for, right away, your site is too concerned with keeping
                people around.

                You can look at bounce rate two ways. The tips about a fast
                loading page are okay, it's just that this is 2013 and I cannot
                fathom such normal things really affecting load time for the
                average person. If this was 1996 dial-up, maybe.

                Having a site too cluttered where people cannot find a thing,
                may actually improve your bounce rate. But a lousy visitor
                experience.

                I'd rather have someone surf in, find what they want, click
                an ad, tell their friends, instead of using up bandwidth
                lollygagging around.

                Paul
                I have business Broadband in a rural area of the UK and it's not great so I do see what you mean. TBH its loading in about 3 secs on my BB so it's not ultra fast but not slow enough to head off somewhere else.
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      • Profile picture of the author Numatik
        Originally Posted by Honest Tune View Post

        My two pennies:
        The site is very slow loading; find a plug-in to reduce load time, wp cache is good.

        The logo in the header is way too large, IMO. I would take it down some in size.

        The navigation in the right is positioned in a totally odd place. I would move it up to a place where the user expects it to be. Either below primary or on left hand side.
        Hmmm the logo is one size to the WP themes dimensions. I may actually have a Photoshop banner with more graphics and resized logo maybe?
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  • Profile picture of the author Numatik
    Honest Tune

    Many thanks for the advice. I will take your info on board and get to work on this.

    Steve
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  • Profile picture of the author Numatik
    Honest Tune -

    I have just downloaded Quick Cache WP which has worked well by the looks of things.

    Thanks for the heads up!!

    Steve
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