Brilliant Bloggers is a weekly series here at BlogWorld where we look at the best posts from around the web all surrounding a specific topic. Every week, we’ll feature three of the most brilliant bloggers out there, along with a huge list of more resources where you can learn about the topic. You can see more Brilliant Blogger posts or learn how to submit your link for an upcoming edition here.
This Week’s Topic: Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is that pesky statistic that tells you how many people click through to other pages on your blog after reading whatever page they landed on in the first place. Earlier this month, I wrote a bit about why bounce rate is important. Today, I wanted to take a moment to link to tons of other bloggers talking about the same topic, including many with tips on how to improve your bounce rate.
Advice from Brilliant Bloggers:
How to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate by Matt Quinn
If you’ve interested in keeping people on your site longer, this post by Matt at Inc.com is a great place to start. Matt gives quite a few tips in this post, from Caleb Whitmore, CEO of Analytics Pros, but the best part of this post is that each tip ends with a “dig deeper” link – another post on the site where you can find more about making the specific tip work for you, whether you’re changing your design or improving load times.
From the post:
A site’s bounce rate is easy to track with tools like Google Analytics. Such tools can show you the bounce rates on different pages of your website, how the user came to your site (organic search, paid search, banner ad, etc.), how the bounce rate has changed over time, and other data so you can really dig into where you might have a leak.
As a rule of thumb, a 50 percent bounce rate is average. If you surpass 60 percent, you should be concerned. If you’re in excess of 80 percent, you’ve got a major problem.
After checking out the entire post, you can find Matt on Twitter @mattquinn16, and he also is a contributor to Wall Street Journal’s corporate finance blog.
The Bounce Rate Myth by Rick Allen
Most bloggers I’ve linked to in this post agree that bounce rate is important, but I think that Rick makes from really good points in this post. When it comes to metrics, nothing is truly black and white, so it’s important to understand your bounce rate and why it might be high (or low). In this post, Rick talks about how you can examine your stats more closely to really understand what’s happening on your site. This is a must-read post – don’t just blindly start to make changes on your site because another blogger says it’s a good idea! Writes Rick,
Analysts typically use bounce rate as a measure of poor quality content — or as an expression of dissatisfaction with your site. But bounce rate has a lot more to say than simply “your website stinks.” In fact, it might even say something good!
As with all web metrics, we need context to provide meaningful insights. Maybe one bounce means a visitor left because she immediately found what she was looking for or bookmarked the page to view it later. Every web metric has more than one angle.
After checking out Rick’s entire post, you can find him on Twitter @epublishmedia.
Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever? by Avinash Kaushik
This post is great because it gives you a really in-depth explanation of how you can track and understand your bounce rate. More importantly, with each step you take to examine your bounce rate, Avinash gives you an “action” – basically, what you can do to make your bounce rate better after looking at your stats. You can examine your site’s numbers as much as you want, but until you actually take action, nothing will change! Writes Avinash,
Start by measuring the bounce rate for your entire website. Any decent web analytics tool will give you this as soon as you log into it. You’ll understand better why your conversion rate is so low, if you have made changes over the last x amount of time then watching a trend of bounce rate is a sure way to know if the changes you are making are for the better.
Now you are ready to dive deeper.
After reading Avinash’s entire post (and hopefully taking some of the steps he recommends to improve your bounce rate), you can find him on Twitter @avinash. He is also the author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and blogs at Occam’s Razor.
Even More Brilliant Advice:
- 3 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rates and Increase Conversions by Gregory Ciotti (@GregoryCiotti)
- 4 Tips to Help Lower Your Website’s Bounce Rate by Craig Kilgore (@ckilgs)
- 5 Killer Ways to Lower Your Bounce Rate by Abhisek Das (@Abhisek_D)
- 7 Ways to Lower Your Website’s Bounce Rate by Kelli Shaver (@kellishaver)
- 8 Proven Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate of Your Website or Blog Successfully by Rosette Summer
- 9 Ways to Keep Visitors on your Website by Voda Host (@vodahost)
- Bounce Rate: 16 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky by Ana Hoffman (@AnaTrafficCafe)
- Bounce Rate Demystified by KissMetrics
- Creative Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate by Melvin Dichoso (@melvinblog)
- Data Driven: Your Bounce Rate and Time On Site are Wrong by Sam Collins (@smcllns)
- Do You Have A Super-High Bounce Rate On Your Site? by David Risley (@davidrisley)
- A High Bounce Rate is a Bad Thing. Or is it? by Jessica Xu
- How 30 seconds dropped my bounce rate by 78% by Dave Ward (@Encosia)
- How Bounce Rate Optimization Can Improve Your Search Rankings by Linda Bustos (@getelastic)
- How I Keep My Bounce Rate Under 2% by Cameron Chapman (@cameron_chapman)
- How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress by Syed Balkhi (@syedbalkhi)
- Improving Your Blogs Bounce Rate With “Best Practices” by James Johnson
- Is a High Bounce Rate Bad? by Michael Gray (@graywolf)
- Time On Site & Bounce Rate: Get the real numbers in Google Analytics by Brian Cray (@briancray)
- Top 5 WordPress Plugins that can Help in Decreasing the Bounce Rate on Your Blog by Satish Gandham (@TechBU)
- Two Simple Rules For Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages by Carrie Hill (@carriehill)
- What does your bounce rate tell you? by Jenika (@jenika29)
- What is Bounce Rate? by Douglas Karr (@douglaskarr)
- What is Bounce Rate? Seven easy steps to decrease the Bounce Rate of your WordPress blog or website. by MK (@coolwebdev)
Did I miss your post or a post by someone you know about Bounce Rate? Unintentional! Help me out by leaving a comment below with the link
Next Week’s Topic: Managing Forums
I’d love to include a link to your post next week – and if you head to the Brilliant Bloggers Schedule, you can see even more upcoming posts. We all have something to learn from one another, so please don’t be shy! Head to the schedule today to learn how to submit your post so I won’t miss it.
Wow, Allison – talk about an exhaustive resource!
Thanks for the link love; always much appreciated.
Thank You Allison for including my post in your list. I must say, greatly analysed on the focused topic. It’s a very good way on providing a lot of posts about a particular topic. Good Work 🙂
Allison, awesome resource! Thanks for including me on the list!
Nice post. As you pointed out, it’s important to know where your visitors are coming from when determining bounce rate. Google Analytics is a good tool to use to determine this. You can look at the keywords people are using to get to your site, and the bounce rate for each keyword. If they are using keywords that are not relevant to your site, then a high bounce rate is expected. But if the keywords are relevant to your site and you have a high bounce rate, then you have some work to do to on the page to keep visitors on your site.
Thanks for including me in your comment list.I found this post very informative from the point of view of bounce rate and viewers visiting your site.Allison you are Brilliant and awesome