If you know and use the Google Analytics to analyze the performance of your site, you are probably familiar with the concept of bounce rate or abandonment rate in Greek.
The dropout rate in general is always scary. It's also because the word has a very negative connotation. Many times I have met people in the industry who are scared with a bounce rate of 90% and wonder how bad it can be for their site, how and how much they should improve it.
Below we will look at some ways to reduce bounce rate that have helped me personally many times in the past.
What is the bounce rate, though?
The bounce rate depends on the user interactions on our websiteor - to be more precise - it depends on the interactions that Google Analytics receives: a pageview, an event, a click and so on.
When a user opens a page on our website and leaves without interacting or opening another page, their login period is 0 seconds, as Google Analytics cannot calculate the duration of the login period.
In practice, Google Analytics uses the signals we give it to understand how long the user stayed on a page. The information that a user entered a page at 13:00 and at 13:05 entered another page, lets him know that he stayed on the 1st page for 5 minutes (and obviously didn't leave).
Therefore, the bounce rate tells us how many sessions stopped after a page view that did not send any other signal to Google Analytics.
The mathematical operation of measurement is the total number of sessions on the site without any interaction divided by the total number of sessions on the site multiplied by 100.
But what ways will help you to reduce it significantly?
1. Look behind the high-low percentages
First of all, keep in mind that a high bounce rate on a page is not necessarily bad. It depends, as we always say. For example, if the landing page that garners a high bounce rate is an integration page that practically can't take the user anywhere else, it makes sense that it has a high bounce rate because the user leaves there.
Also, in the case of one-page websites, where the whole site is a single url and again we can have a high abandonment rate if we don't have some events to take signals from user behavior.
A rate of abandonment 30-50% which is the average performance of most sites, is a good number to target.
2. Do an analysis of the high bounce rate
The information that your site has a high bounce rate is just the stimulus to look further into what it means. Check which sources and landing pages are garnering the highest bounce rate to find the real problem for each case.
Does a page of yours with the way the title and text is written bring in the wrong people? Are people not finding the information you promise?
Make a list of the pages with the highest bounce rate and examine them carefully in terms of content, User Interface and User Experience.
Do the same based on sources and devices.
3. Make More Call-To-Actions
Make sure your pages always have the best prompts and links that will keep the user on your site and find the information they need.
It's not just a matter of claiming a higher conversion-rate, but also of getting visitors to interact with your content, read more articles, or even see more products.
4. Links are our friends
How many times have you been led from one article to another? Or even from one product to another?
The internal linking within the text, in addition to helping you with SEO, provides more ways for the user to visit more pages.
Use not just links, but links that interest him. The related articles/products and links to keywords is a common recipe that works. A page that offers many options to continue browsing is a page that can reduce the abandonment rate.
5. Create Events for important actions
As we wrote at the beginning, one factor that will help Google Analytics to better measure the duration of sessions is the recording of interactions. The solution here is to create events.
These events, initially, can be something that already exists on our pages, such as scrolling, viewing a video, subscribing to the newsletter or even a "timer" that counts each session that exceeds the X duration.
Personally, many times it has helped me to have scroll events, so that when the user has gone down to e.g. 90% of a page, Google Analytics records it. This helps me doubly, as I can also tell which pages have the most scrolls.
An even better idea is to combine event creation with improvements to the site itself. Add more options to the user that will lead to more pageviews and actions on your site.
6. Improve the speed
Yes, you've generally read this many times. The loading speed of site pages plays a role in many things, one of them is bounce rate. Studies have shown in the past that higher page load speeds increase the likelihood of visitor abandonment by up to 123%.
When your product is practically pages, you need to be able to give them quickly to the person who asks for them. The faster he consumes pages, the faster he has better user experience and you less abandonment.
7. Optimization for mobile
Open Google Analytics in the Audience, Mobile menu and check the abandonment it has on mobile phones. Chances are you have a much higher bounce rate on mobile devices.
Try to give mobile users an amazing experience: your content should be readable, load quickly and your site should be fully functional on all devices.
In this case, study the pages of your site that are visited by mobile users to better focus on mobile optimization.
