Monetize your site by reducing bounce rate
A website is the main gateway to sell your ideas, services and products online. Webmaster tools like Google analytics help in analyzing how well you have reached the public and where you have to improve.
Check your bounce rate, which indicates the number of visitors who have come to your home page and left your site without moving to other pages on your site. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your page views. If your bounce rate is high, then it means that you are not sailing down the right path.
How do you reduce the bounce rate on your site? It is not a difficult task; you can reduce it by studying and improving certain features of your site. As you go through this article, you will see how easy it is.
Relevant Content
“Content is the king of a website”. People come to your site in search of answer for their questions. If the content on your site doesn’t answer them well, visitors are not going to stay on your site and search for something that does answer their questions. While optimizing a web page, consider your audience. Spend some time in understanding your target audience and use the terminology they use. This will decline your bounce rate significantly.
Navigation
Once visitors land on your page, they will look for specific content (like product price). If they cannot find it within a minute, they will leave your site immediately to find details of other similar products. Help your visitors in finding out their desired content by offering clear navigation, to make them stay on your site. Place menu bars in the top or side frames and offer sitemap, so that people can move throughout the site with ease.
Interact with visitors
Visitors will stay longer on your site when you interact with them through polls or surveys. It is quite natural for people to reply, vote or stick around an interesting question. You can also ask visitors to comment and provide suggestions on your site.
To be avoided
Avoid external links on the first page, this diverts users to other sites. Avoid pop ups as they can annoy visitors. Most users block pop-ups, so any content in a pop-up on your site may be missed by users completely.
It is important to optimize every single page of your site to reduce bounce rate.
Tags: google analytics, lower bounce rate, raise page views, reduce bounce rate
May 8th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Thanks for the hints! However, if people are searching for something very specific and they find the right article f.e. via Google, why should they click any further? They have all the info they need on this page…
I m also wondering, if it would be a bounce when people leave the page via an advert! I wouldnt mind too much on that “miss”…
May 16th, 2009 at 3:51 am
Hi, for clarification bounce rate is only not the rate of visitors to a homepage who do not visit any other page in that session, if applies to ALL pages so if someone visits domain.com/subdir/subdir/page.html and then leaves that is a bounce too.
If people click on a advert when they are on the first page of their visit, it is a bounce, but if the advert is pay per click this may be the desired action. Measuring bounce rates when pages have certain kinds of advertising can be conflicting.