How I reduced the Bounce Rate on my website from 60% to 6%

By Anoop Nair on January 10, 2015 24 Comments / 3505 views

Dear Friends

To all those who are not aware of the term – Bounce rate and its impact on your website, here is a short intro (Source : Wikipedia) – Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site. High bounce rates typically indicate that the website isn’t doing a good job of attracting the continued interest of visitors

The image above is a screenshot from my Google Analytics dashboard. I will explain the graph first before I jump into the really simple technique that helped me achieve the goal.

The Orange line depicts the Bounce rate on my website during the period – 27 Nov to 13 Dec (60%). The blue line depicts the Bounce rate for the period – 15 Dec to 25 Dec 2014 (6%).

There is a total reduction of 90% that I achieved within a week’s time.

The only thing that helped me reduce the bounce rate on my website is content. Content is King. I continuously worked on updating the content on my website that includes both text and images. Content doesn’t mean that I have to work on product descriptions only. But, I also had to work on the About Us page, Terms, Refund policy, Blog, Privacy policy, etc. All these efforts helped me engage my visitors more on the website and they started browsing through the various links who earlier used to either close the tab or simply jumped to another website due to poor content.

I am still working on devoting a fraction of my time to update the content on my website on a regular basis. Now I have set a target of achieving ~0 % bounce rate on my website. If I can get down from 60% to 6%, then the next target should not be that hard. Will share the result soon with you all.

Thanks for reading my post!

Anoop Nair (Co-Founder | The South Indian Store, Selling South Indian Snacks online )

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+

******************** UPDATE – 15-Jan-2015******************

The Bounce rate of 6% that I achieved was not correct. There was a bug inside my website’s GA code. The website actually had two instances of the Google Analytics (GA) code that prevented any bounce from being counted. More details can be found in the comments on Alok’s Facebook post. The issue was basically with the GA dashboard plugin for WordPress. I was unaware that it would add a new / duplicate code for GA even if the code already exists. I went ahead and updated the site and removed the duplicate GA code. Hope to get correct data now.

Comments

Anoop Nair

24 Comments

asha chaudhry January 12, 2015, 6:13 am

neat insight anoop!

trhs unfortunately has a high bounce rate as well. help me figure out what we should do 🙂
Anoop Nair January 13, 2015, 9:32 am

I don’t feel you need to do anything to reduce the bounce rate. Its already too much content and that too high quality and relevant. So, I can’t see any scope of further improvement :-).

Thanks!
manjunath January 13, 2015, 10:00 am

On a completely other note, why dont you include an assorted pack so that someone can know how all taste. Furthermore, an assorted sample pack also makes sense, be it given for free or at C2C.
Shiv Bhaker January 13, 2015, 12:51 pm

Hi, i think boun
Krishna Gaurav January 13, 2015, 1:18 pm

Asha- Regarding trhs you should work on the design, fonts and formatting of the posts. There are too many fonts and the design is not much pleasing to keep the user interested. Also the posts should include more bullet points.

Good example would be posts on businessinsider, fastcompany or hubspot. Let me know if you need any further help.
asha chaudhry January 13, 2015, 2:27 pm

krishna,

all of our posts are created by the members only. we encourage them to use the default font.

i don’t edit members’ content, except if it’s objectionable. and we don’t have an editorial team to fix formatting etc.

i normally give suggestions to members while moderating each post. which includes things like adding subheads, images, bullet points, embedding ppts & videos, etc etc apart from essential information to share.

our design is by and large restricted by NING the platform we are on.

if you’d like to volunteer to help us fix the design (if you are familiar with NING) that would be awesome! feel free to write to me at asha@rodinhood.com

thanks!
Jeyo Sargunam January 13, 2015, 4:37 pm

Hi

It could be great if you give details on what all you changed on the landing page & also if you can share the pre & post optimized screenshots.

Thanks JEyo
Tarun January 14, 2015, 2:13 am

Congratzz Anoop.

Kindly share more details.
Anoop Nair January 14, 2015, 3:41 am

Thanks for the suggestion Manjunath. Will consider it!
Anoop Nair January 14, 2015, 3:44 am

Hi Jeyo

Unfortunately I do not have a screenshot of my old website pages. But you can read through this post to see what potential changes i made to my website to get more engaging traffic. Read the post here

Thanks!
Anoop Nair January 14, 2015, 3:45 am

Hi Tarun

Unfortunately I do not have a screenshot of my old website pages. But you can read through this post to see what potential changes i made to my website to get more engaging traffic. Read the post here

Thanks!
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 10:14 am
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 10:14 am

anoop,

am adding screenshots of the comments on alok’s fb – may give us all some more insights!!
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 10:15 am
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 10:55 am

image 3
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 11:33 am
okay – i got tired of taking screenshots!!
- Same Issue Discussed on Google Forum:https://productforums.google.com/forum/…
  
  54 mins · Unlike · 3
- Vaibhav Kakkar @ Hiren Bang on!!
  
  Also to add to what you said, another outcome of having the same GA code twice on your site will be the the number of impressions your site is getting will double up although the number of unique visitors stays the same.
  
  41 mins · Like
- Rohhan A Divanji So… If the GA code is twice, then can we assume actual bounce rate is double? So if my bounce rate shows 2.65, does that Mean in reality is 5.3? And the GA code coming twice, does it impact the entire traffic data? Does that mean all traffic is half, all conversions are double? Time spent as well….
  
  41 mins · Like
- Rohhan A Divanji @vaibhav – basically how do the numbers change with GA code twice?
  
  39 mins · Like
- Vaibhav Kakkar No rohan! Read Hiren’s explanation above, its bang on.
  Google thinks same person is opening another page or doing some activity on page, hence the bounce is almost “ZERO” the small amount of bounce which you do see is because of people who dont let the full page open or in cases when the page does not load fully and hence the second GA is not triggered.
  Also at the same time having 2 GA codes on your page will double the page impressions in your GA account.
  
  33 mins · Edited · Like
- Rohhan A Divanji So I will never know my actual bounce rate will I?
  
  35 mins · Like
- Vaibhav Kakkar Have GA on your page once and you will know your actual bounce rate
asha chaudhry January 14, 2015, 11:33 am
- 34 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas No…It means Google analytics assumes that the visitor did not bounce and did some activity on the page …pls refer my first reply …
  
  34 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas It means 2% of ur visitors left after the first pixel but even before the next one could.
  
  32 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas Pages / visit plus other analytics data might give better insights …
  
  31 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas Btw it’s very unlikely that anyone can significantly improve bounce rate by adding a lot of content. Bounce rate is usually a function of 1. Something on the landing page made the visitor pause / wait. Plus some event / activity/ click/ navigation was performed on the page
  
  29 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas Any single digit bounce rate is probably a pixel misfire
  
  27 mins · Like
- Hiren Vasani One Should not use same GA Pixel Code Twice on a page. As Vaibhav Said it will not only decrease the bounce rate, but also doubles your Pageviews, Pages/Session & also ecommerce data. I also want to add that even if you using Same code twice no’s of Session, session time & Users data Will be accurate.
  
  For anything if you want to use code twice, create a new property & use that code.
  
  10 mins · Like
- Rajesh Vyas Google even allows u to fire some kinds of pixels while mentioning if it should impact bounce rates (for eg …event)
  
  8 mins · Like
asha chaudhry January 15, 2015, 3:52 am
- Ashwin Krishna Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal Not all all clear, boss. It will be great to know lot more data – what stage the site is in, drilling down what pages had the maximum bounce rate and what happened later!
  
  15 hrs · Like
- Suresh Ramani I have read that bounce rate of the range of 50 – 55% is quite OK. So I was shocked when I read a single digit bounce rate.
  
  13 hrs · Like
Anoop Nair January 15, 2015, 4:20 am

Thank you Asha for continuously posting all the updates from facebook here. As I also mentioned in the Facebook comment thread, I went ahead and updated the site and removed the duplicate GA code. Hope to get correct data now. The issue was basically with the GA dashboard plugin for WordPress. I was unaware that it would add a new / duplicate code for GA even if the code already exists.
Harika Maruboyina January 19, 2015, 7:33 am

Hello Anoop,

That’s a very precise post. It’s interesting that you have exponentially reduced your bounce rate very organically. Congratulations on that. Just a quick question for you. Does it have a direct impact on your conversions too? Did you get new customers following this?
Amit Shroff January 21, 2015, 4:27 am

Hi Anoop,

Great Article,

I need little help. Issue at my end is the organic bounce rate is fare say 35 to 40% but direct, social etc leads to more then 50+%. Can you tell me how do I control this. Here is the summary for jan 2015.

Regards,

Amit
Anoop Nair January 22, 2015, 2:26 am

Hi Harika

If you note the bottom of my post, I have added an update there. The data I mentioned was incorrect due to some technical glitch. And regarding conversions and new customers.. Yes you are right, I definitely managed to get new customers on board and also increased conversion rate.

Thanks!
Anoop Nair January 22, 2015, 2:42 am

Hi Amit

I am no Analytics expert but what I feel the reason for a low Organic bounce rate and a high social bounce rate could be that the organic traffic is the one that is searching for something that your website provides and they clicked the link on search results to get there. They would go through your services and different pages to see what you can offer. But in case of direct / social they are usually casual visitors.

Thanks!
Amit Shroff January 22, 2015, 3:34 pm

Anoop Thanks.. I know that so what are the basic step that we can follow to reduce the bounce rate.. How do you think we can reduce the bounce rate.. any idea or suggestion – please visit http://www.printawallpaper.com