Bounce Rate refers to the number or percentage of visitors entering the website but then leaving (bouncing) instead of continuing to stay on the site or viewing other pages of the site. Bounce Rate can be calculated by dividing no. of total single page visits by total no. of visits.

Bounce Rate is nothing but a measure of engagement visitors shows while visiting a website. As a general assumption, a productive website will be able to engage the visitors and will compel them to go deeper in the site visiting other pages of the website. The longer the visitor stays on the website, the lower will be the Bounce Rate. Interestingly, when you reduce your Bounce Rate you are increasing your Conversion Rate automatically.

It’s not always bad to have a high Bounce Rate. There are various factors which determine the Bounce Rate. These are as under:

The type of website you possess: Bounce Rate differs for different types of websites. Like if you have a blog page, then you will tend to have a high Bounce Rate. Reason being readers will read your blog and will bounce off to the next content or thing. In case of single page website Bounce Rate could be even 100%.

What’s the source of your traffic: The Bounce Rate depends on the source of the traffic on your website. Means, if you are getting the traffic from social media your Bounce Rate is supposed to be high as compared to the traffic you have from organic traffic from the search engines.

The grade and traits of the landing page: If a visitor is looking for your contact information and visits your contact page and gets the desired contact information, then they are more likely to bounce and move on as they got what they were looking for in order to contact you. Whereas, if you have a disarranged landing page having unnecessary and inappropriate content or is visually not appealing, you’ll probably experience a high Bounce Rate.

Intention of the user with which he’s visiting your website: User Intent refers to the purpose or intention with which the user is visiting your website. Whether they are visiting for buying something, referring something, to go somewhere online or want to know something. If your landing page satisfies the user with the required information then it will automatically optimize and reduce your Bounce Rate.

Your Industry type: The Bounce Rate also depends upon the type of your industry. Certain industries will have a high Bounce rate like the publishing industry. You can check the average Bounce Rate for your industry to see if it’s higher than the usual and to take corrective measures to optimize it.

Caliber and standard of your website content: If the content on your website doesn’t satisfy or furnish the visitors with the information they require, than they may leave your page or bookmark it to refer it later. Having a clear and precise content is important to reduce the Bounce Rate.

Traffic relevance and quality: If you are getting irrelevant traffic on your website then you’ll have a higher Bounce Rate. It’s crucial to target your traffic accurately in order to avoid unnecessary traffic.

Types of visitors: Visitors who have already been to your website will not bounce back at once as they are familiar of the content and type of information on your website. On the other hand, new visitors are likely to bounce back as they are not aware of your website content and pages.

Type of device used to visit the website: If someone is visiting your website from a mobile phone and your site is not responding properly to that, then, your Bounce Rate will tend to be higher as the visitor is not able to surf through your website and as a result he’ll bounce back and try to visit some other site for reference.

How to reduce the Bounce Rate?

Following methods can be used to reduce the Bounce Rate:

• Make your content more interesting, readable and easy to understand. Writing the content in the form of long paragraphs makes it look boring and hard to read. Instead, write it in points or small paragraphs so that users find it easy to read.

• Make use of High-Value Keywords which in turn will attract High-Value Traffic. Keywords can bring a substantial difference to your traffic quality. While choosing the keywords the 4 important parameters should be kept in mind – Conversion Value, Traffic Value, Persona Value and Brand Value.

• Make use of Split-Testing to find out what the visitors prefer to see. In this testing, two varied layouts of your website are delivered randomly to the visitors with different font colors, different layout, different button placement, etc., to see which layout is more liked by the visitors. Your website design will become more refined with more split-testing.

• Make your Meta Description more relatable and enticing. Meta Description is the short summary which appears under your website link in the search engine. It’s basically a short content describing what the users will find on the website pages. It’s a glimpse to your website.

• Make your website page open fast as slow opening pages give a high bounce rate. When the visitor has to wait for too long to see the content on website, he is likely to bounce off and visit other sites. The general assumption is that your page should not take more than 2 seconds to open.

• Having too many advertisements and other distracting flash messages on your page makes it less appealing and less user friendly thus, giving you a higher Bounce Rate.

• Make sure that your website is mobile friendly as in today’s time mobile traffic has exceeded the desktop traffic. If your website doesn’t support mobile traffic than your Bounce Rate is likely to be high.