Today’s Topic is Google Bounce Rate Defined and an analysis of how they effect your online store. I am your host, Caitlin. Let’s start off of with the most spot-on-definition on bounce rate provided by Google themselves: A Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

When determining your bounce rate, there are tools like Google Analytics, Yahoo!, Omniture..and more that help you find out these percentages.

Why should we care about bounce rates?

Well, it’s good to note that bounce rates can be calculated sitewide for specific pages or even for different sources of traffic.

Let’s start with page-specific bounce rates. In knowing the Google bounce rate of particular pages on your site, you can put the pieces together as to why your site’s conversions rates may be lower than you wish. If you have specific outlier pages on your site that are under-performing, they may be the first place you focus on to improve the overall site and capitalize on an opportunity for growth. Here’s how I read a bounce rate of 60% for a particular page: 6 of every 10 visitors felt that the page did not live up to whatever expectation was set before the person visited that page.

This is a good segue for those expectations that have been set. Since you can also use Google bounce rates to see how SEO and PPC are performing as sources of traffic, you can determine whether those expectations were set properly. As Google states in their definition, it is imperative that users are landing on the most relevant pages searched. It is never a good thing if a user searches for brown boots and lands on a page with zero brown boots in sight. That would result in a very high Google bounce rate. If you identify keywords in your SEO and PPC portfolio that have high bounce rates, you may want to revisit those pages as a visitor and see whether your expectations were met properly.

In figuring out how to decrease your bounce rate and increase your conversion rates, you are on the path to generating more sales and get return customers.

So how do you fix low bounce rates throughout your site to get your conversion rates higher or increase revenue?

It is important to know when trying to fix the problem you need to look at the individual pages not the overall website bounce rate. If you find through your analytics that you have a low bounce rate on your homepage but a very high bounce rate on your category pages, start fixing the issue at the category page level.

How do you know if you have a low bounce rate? Start by comparing bounce rates of individual pages against the site average. Then analyze from a users perspective why the page is being rejected by visitors. There are simple analyses you can do, or you can work with a team like Exclusive Concepts to approach it in a systematic, professional way.

Your analysis will lead to a set of hypotheses that you’ll want to test in order to see if you can in fact reduce bounce rates and improve your conversation rates. When it comes to improving this goal, an incremental, testing approach is the best way to achieve the most significant improvement without ever committing to the wrong idea.

I hope today’s conversion Wednesday was helpful. Exclusive Concepts offers Conversion Booster as a service to help our clients identify the best ideas to improve factors like bounce rate and especially conversion rates and then test them to find winners that improve revenue one goal at a time.

We would be happy to audit the opportunity that we believe exists for your site in terms of conversion and bounce rate improvements. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 to reserve a free audit today.