The bounce rate of a page is one of the most important metrics a content marketer can track. Understanding what a bounce rate is allows you to analyze the value of your content based on real visitors to your website. This allows you to not only improve the user experience of your pages, but also increase conversions and search engine rankings.
What is a bounce rate?
Bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors to your website simply leave from the page they initially landed on without visiting any other pages or performing any further actions. Traffic to your website can vary in value depending on how engaged each visitor is, and it is the bounce rate metric that can help you to determine how engaged your audience is, in combination with other metrics like session duration and the average time spent on your individual pages.
If you want to increase your conversions, you need traffic that is highly engaged with your content. Engaged visitors are actively interested in what they’re reading and more willing to follow call-to-action prompts or related links, flowing down your sales funnel from visitor to actual customer. Knowing your bounce rate can help you improve your website substantially and gain more real customers as a result.
Optimizing bounce rate
The first step to optimizing your bounce rate and gaining more conversions is to understand where your traffic is coming from. Whether they’re arriving at your site from a search engine, social media, or through other means helps to tell you what expectations they have of your content.
Search engine traffic is often the most important traffic source for most content marketers, and your visitors from this source use keywords to reach your site. This gives you a lot of valuable information already, as you can determine the common keywords that visitors use to reach any individual page using tools like Google Search Console. If the keywords that were used aren’t a very good match to your content, visitors will have a high bounce rate as a result because your page was inherently not what they’re looking for.
Understanding the relationship between your pages and the keywords those pages rank for helps you determine how to adjust your strategy to improve engagement. If a large proportion of your search audience isn’t engaged because of a keyword mismatch, update your content to help it better reflect the information they were looking for. It can also be beneficial to target different keywords if they represent a better value by bringing in visitors who will be more interested in your business or purchasing in general.
Social media traffic can be analyzed similarly, but unlike search traffic you can’t really change your approach if your audience is reaching your site through someone else’s social media links. You can adjust your content to better match visitor intent if appropriate, but some social media traffic will always be a write-off when you receive visitors who have blindly clicked on links without knowing much about your site’s purpose. To capture more of this traffic as potential customers, focus on making your content more attractive in general and use bounce rate and other statistics as a measure of your progress. More people will give your content a chance if your site is aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.
What else can bounce rate tell you?
Apart from improving the general engagement of your website, bounce rate can also be used as a measure to gauge any improvements to your sales copy and some of the other important elements of your sales pages. This is achieved by comparing the original bounce rate to any change in bounce rate that occurs after you update a page.
Not only is this a powerful way to fine-tune your landing pages over time, but it also helps to inform your process in the future so that you can write new content that has a higher potential for conversion without going through as many of the analytical steps again. Bounce rates help you write better sales copy and design a better user experience for your target audience because they help you to understand your audience itself better.
You can also use bounce rates in a similar way to track user engagement to specific events on a page, like clicking a certain link or detecting whether visitors choose to use a web app. Bounce rate comparisons help you to make it more appealing for visitors to use these features of your website, or to improve these features further. Without the bounce rate metric, it would be much harder to analyze what features on your site are providing value to your users, and how they can be enhanced further.
Bounce rate may be just one important metric among many that you should be tracking, but it is an especially important statistic to track if you’re a content marketer or webmaster. Giving it the attention it deserves helps you to make your content and website as a whole more successful and can even serve to drive more conversions as a result. This helps your online business to truly thrive.
