When people start analyzing their website traffic, one of the statistics that’s always included is unique visitors. In other words, your traffic statistics always includes the number of people who visit your website for the very first time.

For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.

Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.

I’m betting that you feel the same way.

Do you have a serious case of bouncing visitors?

So the first thing you need to do to find out if you’ve got a serious case of bouncing visitors is to determine your bounce rate. This is really easy to do if you use any kind of analytics software on your website… which you definitely should. By simply logging into your website analytics, you can see how many visitors are coming to your site, how many pages they looked at, and if they left your site shortly after arriving to it.

In Awstats, for example, the software offers a section that calculates the amount of time each visitor is staying on your site called “Visits duration.” If visitors are staying less than 30 seconds, then you have a serious case of bouncing visitors.

If you use SBI (my favorite host), then you can get a pretty good idea of your bounce rate by doing a few simple calculations.

For example: 123,784 divided by 381,149 gives you an overall bounce rate of 32%. That may sound high, but it’s actually a very low bounce rate.

Unfortunately, most hosting services don’t offer advanced analytics software as part of their packages because most people just don’t know what to do with all that data. That’s why I highly suggest that you invest in your business with analytic software that gives you a really clear picture of what your visitors are doing on your website… including bounce rate. Here are a few options (that I’m not affiliated with) that you can look into:

http://www.statcounter.com
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.webtrends.com

If you have a high bounce rate…

Before you get yourself in a panic over your bounce rate, remember that this is really just a yardstick to measure your website against. There are a lot of factors that can affect your bounce rate, including where the traffic is coming from, purpose of your website and specific landing pages, website design, and your website goals. You have to keep all these things in mind as you determine if you have a problem on your hands.

If you’re concerned about your website bounce rate, here are a few questions that you should be asking yourself:

1. Is your website compelling? You never know for sure what page visitors will land on when they visit your website, so it pays to look at your website as a whole and decide if you’ve presented yourself in a compelling and interesting way. Offering visitors lots of interesting content within your niche is a great way to engage your visitors and keep them at your site longer.

2. Is navigation easy? There’s nothing more frustrating than to click through to a website and find it nearly impossible to find anything on it. Navigation should be easy and intuitive so that visitors can immediately feel at home.

3. Is your website or landing page broken? Sometimes a high bounce rate can be directly related to a website issue. Visitors can easily be driven to the back button is your form is broken, images are missing on the page, or the pages are taking too long to load. Another big issue could be browser compatibility. If your website looks broken in Firefox, for example, then any visitor who uses Firefox will be put off by your website. Any of these factors can chase your visitors away before they even have a chance to look deeper into your site.

4. Are you targeting the right keywords? Keywords are something that I harp on a lot, but this is another situation where it pays to do your keyword homework. If you’re attracting visitors through the wrong keywords, then they won’t be the kind of highly targeted visitors that you need… and they’ll leave your site very quickly. This goes for paid advertising, organic SEO, Adwords, etc. Keywords are still your best bet to lowering your bounce rate.

5. Do you tell visitors where to go? Okay, you may be thinking H-E-double toothpicks, but I was referring to using a call to action, pointing them where you want them to go on your website, and setting up a strategic path for them. Visitors are more likely to dig deeper into your website if you’ve gotten them interested in “what’s next” on your website.

6. Where are your visitors coming from? This factor is probably the biggest one to consider if you have a high bounce rate. For example, if you advertise extensively in PPC’s, then your advertising could be seriously affecting your bounce rate. In addition, when your traffic comes from article marketing, link exchanges, search engines, forums, etc. it all affects your bounce rate. Once you know where you’re traffic is coming from, then you can make adjustments to your marketing in order to reduce your bounce rate.

Is bounce rate really that important?

I think it’s pretty important, but you’ll have to make up your own mind where this factor fits into your own business. In my view, anything that gives me clues to what’s working or not working on my websites is well worth investigating.

As with anything else in your online business, you really have to keep the big picture in mind. There are so many factors that can affect your bounce rate that you could drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out. In addition, different types of websites can actually produce bigger bounce rates. For example, blogs typically have a higher bounce rate than simple content driven websites.

You might be able to correct a high bounce rate with something as easy as simplifying your website navigation or changing your header graphics… making the whole thing well worth it.

To me, it’s all about the bottom line. If the bounce rate affects my bottom line, then it’s worth my time. How about your?

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