Have you ever encountered in a situation where a person didn’t like you and judged you with one interaction? That is the most plausible mortification one can ever face. The face of disgrace.

What if something like the above instance happened to your website? Your website is the face of your business and any pessimistic response or criticism from your audience will be a downright failure in your online business. Your “Bounce Rate” is when people do this to your website.

There is a probable chance that this might happen to your website or any other website that has been built imperfectly, right at the minute your audience land on your webpage there is likely chance they would detest your website and decide to “bounce”(leave) even before they completely understand about your product/service.

Wouldn’t that be a grave loss for your website?

• 90% of the websites on the internet have poor conversion statistics because of high bounce rates.
• Google doesn’t retain your website rankings on search results if the bounce rate is high
• Your ad rank/quality score will be poor for paid campaigns which in turn, would lead to high CPC/CPA or sometimes might not be eligible to rank up on search results despite elevated bids/CPC’s
• If you’re a part of display network you could see decreased ad revenues with increased bounce rates, e.g.: if you have registered for Google ad sense you would see a drop in ad revenue with increased load times.

Having a good first impression is important as it asserts your dominance and assures reliability, in order to ensure that we assist you in identifying what’s happening with your website with regard to bounce rate. Submit your information to us, we will get back to you with a detailed report!

Bounce Rate is the measure of engagement/activities of your users on the website. More the activities and engagement, better and elevated the bounce rate.

What contributes to the overall improvement of a Bounce Rate?

• Scrolling of a webpage.
• Navigating to other webpages.
• Filling forms on the webpage.
• Clicks at different links on the webpage.
• Maximizing time by engaging the users on the website.

Here’s a bizarre fact of what makes your Bounce Rate better:

“The lower the Bounce Rate % number is, the better and beneficial it is”

For instance; 30% Bounce Rate is better than 60% Bounce Rate!

Have you ever given a thought of what makes your Users not perform any activities on your website?

Below are some of the top possible reasons for high bounce rates of your website for search engine traffic:

Serving content to wrong audience or serving wrong content to the right audience.

Serving a wrong content to your users or bringing error prone content to them is one of the many common mistakes by Digital Marketing Professionals and this is considered to be as one of the biggest problems prior to website performance issues.

Optimizing the page for completely irrelevant keywords:

Let’s assume your product is iPhone X and you are optimizing the page to buy shoes online, these kinds of issue are uncommon and would happen usually with the paid search campaigns where the targeting keyword match type is broad with no negative list.

Optimizing the webpage for keywords of low intent with regard to the user’s interest:

Let’s assume your product is iPhone X and you want to sell it online, now let’s also consider the various kinds of search on the internet and one specific term picked from it, lets say, iPhone X pouch or iPhone x launch date, here the user is interested in pouch for the device or details of its launch date and if you land them on an e-commerce page attempting to sell a product would be a complete failure and the user would eventually not prefer to stay or explore further as he wouldn’t find what he is looking for.

Optimizing the webpage for generic searches:

Let’s take the above example, now if you are optimizing your webpage for ‘’mobile phone” or “iPhone” which is very generic in nature, we are not sure what exactly the user is looking for? He must be looking for details like mobile phone inventor, best mobile phones in market and more, but then the query is generic and hence optimizing a webpage with such generic term without understanding the intention of the searches would disappoint the users and hence the Bounce Rates are high for such generic searches.

Landing on the wrong page:

Landing users on the wrong page are the most common mistake with the paid activities and e-mail marketing and hence one needs to pay more attention to their paid campaign landing pages.

Wrong E-mail list:

The wrong email list is one of the common problems with email marketers, unknowingly they must be an owning a wrong audience database and promoting any content to them without understanding their interests would turn out to be a colossal disaster.

Targeting the wrong audiences:

Digital marketers have to take care of the audience’s list, creation for their paid promotions, especially for the display marketing on all platforms which also includes remarketing, and Gmail ads. Most of them create a wrong audience list and promote their product/services to them and this is one of the main reason for an abysmal Bounce Rates.

Accessibility

High load times.

High load times on the website is the biggest reason in 90% of the internet hosted website for the high bounce rate, and the reason for high load times is as follows:

• Poor design practices.
• Shared servers.
• Poor coding practices.
• Non Optimized content such as images and videos.

Errors served.

The errors usually the users face on the website are as follows:

• 404 status header- file not found on the server and the default messages will be served to users, here a custom built page can be served for the non-existence page request
• 500 status header- In this case, the issue is from the server, a server must be either busy or not able to respond to the request and in this case finding the causes for such poor performance of the server and fixing is crucial.
• 301/302 Status header- This is a redirection and this won’t be a problem until and unless the redirection is to the wrong page. The redirection would increase the latency and in turn, would impact the speed/performance of the website and which is again negligible.

Browser Errors

In recent times some of the browsers star displaying the message as the site is not secure to browse due to the nonsecure connection and this will have a significant impact on the bounce rates and in turn SEO performance.

Every site needs an SSL certificate to be installed so the connections between browsers and servers will be secure and this has become the most crucial one for all the websites regardless of the payments gateways integration.

Presentation

Content presentation on the webpage is most crucial, it needs the understanding of user preferences and also needs to be aligned with the business goals. The content presentation might not be proper for the following reasons:

Technical issues-

IP detection plays a crucial role on websites which has region-specific content, the region-specific content deals with language, venue, currency and many other variables which are all dynamic and dependent on the IP detection and any issues such as no detection or wrong detection and serving content based on it would lead to a bad user experience and in return increase high bounce rates.

Sometimes IP detection itself would impact the performance of the webpage due to the failures or not good IP to locate API’s and delays in rendering content on web pages

Product planning may be poor.

Structure of site, navigation, and users preferences are very necessary for building the product/website and any wrong practices in it may affect the user experience, in turn, high Bounce Rates.

Devices Compatibility:

The website has to be compatible with all the devices, paying attention only to desktops and neglecting other devices can create a huge impact on the Bounce Rate. Addressing this is very crucial as mobile device usage is growing by a significant number every passing year and it has turned out to be the highest used device for browsing content on the internet or websites.

wrong images/videos or text.

Placing wrong content on the webpage such as videos, images, and text is another big fatal mistake you can incur. An inappropriate content is one of the biggest reason for high Bounce Rates.

Functionality

There are many instances on the webpage which are functional in nature and them not functioning can impact the Bounce Rate,

Eg: Asking for sign up and the sign-up links may not work or may be broken.

Below are some of the functional instances on the webpage:

Form

Nil Requests for content on DB/Server and which is not rendered on time.

• Broken Links
• Absolutely no validation
• No IP detection
• Device detection and more.
• 
  Visibility

Brand presence:

If people are already aware of your brand through offline promotions or Tv commercials, there are a few chances of users responding positively, as they are already aware of you and will have an emotional connection instantly.

Special offers/Discounts:

The offer and discounts may play a small role in improving the bounce rates when they add value to the customers.

If you’re still in a state of oblivion or denial on how things with Bounce Rate work or finding it complex to plan accordingly keeping a myriad of consequences in mind or want to control the ever-increasing Bounce Rates on your website? We will be elated to be of assistance to you, our consultants will find a way through. Get in touch with us to know more.

Ramya Teja

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.