There's more to bounce rates than your homepage. Photo by Aldo Risolvo.

Do you know which pages your visitors first see when they come to your website (other than your homepage of course)?

And do you know how many of those lovely visitors actually stick around long enough to do anything?

In my experience many web teams and managers don’t really know the answers to these important questions. And yes… I’m guilty of this too.

Bounces are missed opportunities. At worse they indicate poor user experience – the sort that damages the reputation of your site, brand and organisation. So not good.

This is the first of two posts that will look into bounce rates and ways to improve the retention of visitors to your site.

Not really sure what all this bounce rate talk is? Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of bounce rates.

Try this now: identify your bouncing pages

In 5 mins you will have a much better idea of where folks are arriving (and quickly departing) from your site. That doesn’t solve the problem but it will trigger a bunch of actions to start reversing this unwelcome trend. We’ll look into some of these in part #2.

Open up your stats package and run the most popular entry page report over the last few months – any decent stats package will have some variation of this. If your pacakge doesn’t I suggest you start using Google Analytics – it’s free, easy and bloody brilliant.

It’s this report in Google Analytics: Content > Top Landing Pages. It even includes the bounce rate for the top pages. Got to love Google!

Ok… no prizes for guessing which page is #1 – your homepage. Well forget about that for now, it’s had enough of your loving care and attention.

What about the other pages on the list? Are they what you expected? These pages are so important to you – they can make or break the user experience. Do any of them have a horrible looking bounce rate?

What’s a good/bad bounce rate?

I really don’t have a definitive answer to this – how long is a piece of string. I’ve read that 50% is pretty normal, but it will vary from site to site and page to page. The important thing is you start to bring that number down.

Tip: get the avg bounce rate for your entire site to see which pages are above avg.

Which pages deserve your attention?

The easy thing to do is list the top 10 or 20 pages with the worst bounce rates and tackle them first.

But which is worse?

a) a page where 20% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 65%
b) or a page where 2% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 90%

I would argue (a), because far more visitors are actually bouncing from this page (even if the bounce rate percentage is lower).

The point is: you have limited time and you need to spend it where you will make the most impact.

From this quick excercise you will probably have a list of 2 or 3 popular entry pages with worryingly high bounce rates. These are the pages to focus on first.

Coming up in Part #2

Part #2 will focus on what can be done with these pages to dig a bit deeper into why they are bouncing so much and actions you can take to reverse this trend.

Stay posted. And as ever… let me know what you think.