MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

After doing everything you can think of to improve the performance of your website, you may still find yourself wondering why it is not achieving its set goals. You’ve made the design user-friendly, you’ve added valuable content, and you’ve invested money and time into marketing it. Yet your Analytics report displays a rather dangerous looking bounce rate, which doesn’t show an inclination to decrease anytime soon.

The definition for Bounce Rate given by Kichus.in is the percentage of web site visitors who exited from the entry pages without going any deeper into the site. The bounce rate is a great measurement of the quality of traffic that is entering the site, and the overall effectiveness of the design, layout and onsite content. It also acts as a tool in PPC for detecting ‘click fraud’, since an unusually high bounce rate (more that 60% or so) is significant enough to raise some alarm.

There are many reasons why a high bounce rate can occur. Some of these occurrences are relatively harmless, and only lead incoming traffic to the wrong area of the site. The visitor may be converted from the landing page itself, or he/she may just be looking for information from the page, a link URL, a section to quote from, an answer to a query, or even a definition. Sometimes when a visitor clicks on your paid ads they only want to look at that page and no further.

The three main reasons for a high bounce rate are most commonly associated with traffic referrals (ensuring that the traffic entering your site is qualified through the search terms used), visitor expectations (ensuring visitors are getting the relevant information/results they have searched for), and landing page quality (design, layout and usability of the landing page). Another possible reason for having a high bounce rate is if your call to action on the page is simply a telephone number. It is then likely that the visitor may leave the site to call the number. This problem can be resolved by having an online enquiry form or ‘let us contact you’ option available.

It is likely that there are other, less significant, reasons as to why a site’s bounce rate is unusually high, but these are the main aspects of your site that need to be regularly checked. By keeping a beady eye on your site’s analytics you may discover that you need to encourage more onsite activity to prevent any damage from occurring to the flow of your website’s traffic.