Routinely analyzing the performance of you website is the key to maximizing your online success. By success, we mean having visitors consistently perform a desired action on your website. That action could be purchasing a product from your online store, downloading a document, signing-up to your newsletter, tweeting about your content, or a host of other decisive actions that a web visitor can take.
There are many different metrics that can be tracked to determine the effectiveness of your website, but let’s start with the most fundamental metric: bounce rate.
What is a bounce rate? Your website’s bounce rate is a metric, usually displayed in the form of a percentage, which indicates how often a web visitor visited a single page of your website and then exited your site. In other words, every time someone reads a page of your site but doesn’t click on any of your links to navigate further, they have bounced. To help you visualize, imagine if you decided to put your home up for sale and you decide to have an open house for interested buyers. Everytime a buyer walks in the front door of you house then turns around and walks out without going into any of the rooms in your house, that person has bounced. Not good.
You always want to have a low bounce rate. If 100 people visit your website this month, ideally, less than 10 of those people will bounce, giving you a <10% bounce rate. This means 90 or more of the visitors decided to explore additional pages on your website. Simple probability tells us that the longer visitors stay on your site, the more likely they are to take one of the decisive actions mentioned in the first paragraph, which is good.
Why is a low bounce rate important? A low bounce rate indicates that your website is easily understandable and intriguing. Visitors are able to quickly understand what your website is about and they can intuitively navigate to content that they’re interested in. Conversely, if your bounce rate is high, visitors to your website are either too confused to navigate further or they don’t see any value in exploring further.
To optimize your site for a low bounce rate, be sure that:
- your pages are not cluttered with too much competing information
- your navigation menu is simple, clean, and organized
- you use heading and subheadings that clearly explain what can be found on that page
- you use visitor friendly fonts and colors (i.e. don’t use size 6 font that’s bright yellow)
A low bounce rate can mean big results for your website and your business. Follow the steps listed above and you’ve laid the first brick in the path to website success.
