Flipping your website analytics to reduce bounce rate

Website analytics do a great job of reporting on what is happening. It’s what isn’t happening that gives me cause for concern. Inspired by flipping pancakes on Tuesday, in this blog post I’ll provide some fresh ideas for reviewing your website’s traffic through Google Analytics.

Bounce rate matters

Consider a medium sized website that gets 5,000 visitors a month. Their bounce rate is 40%.

Sounds OK?

Nope! It means that they are loosing 2,000 visitors a month or 66 visitors a day. If we now assume that the conversion rate is 2% then the business is loosing 40 leads/sales a month or 480 a year.

How to reduce your bounce rate

To be clear, the bounce rate is a stat you want to go down not up. Bounce rate is measured as people who visit a page on your website and then leave without going further. For me it is a measure of landing page relevance, i.e. how closely the page matches the user’s expectations.

Firstly you need to identify your biggest problem pages. Go to Content > Top Landing pages and then use the advanced filter to select all of the pages with a bounce rate higher than the average:

Bounce rate filter

You now have a list of the problem pages that you can begin fixing. I notice that on Quba’s report that most of the pages are blog articles. The next step is to critically review the blog post templates along with the content. As Business Development Director I now have a task that’s easy to complete and I can set a goal of what I want to reduce the content by.

Improve my landing pages

What am I going to do to reduce the bounce rate for these landing pages? A good question and one that I wouldn’t want to answer with any more than these suggestions:

Make the content easier to read by adding an introductory paragraph, bullet points and sub-headings
Remove any external links in the content and put these at the bottom of the report
Ensure that every blog post has a next steps section for readers to click further into the site

In my next blog post I’ll report back on how these efforts have effected the bounce rate.