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.