Understanding your site’s bounce rate is essential to your online presence success.

A low bounce rate signifies ineffectiveness and lost revenue. A high bounce rate signifies your visitors are meeting your objectives and taking action.

Bounce rate is defined as percentage of visitors who come onto your site and leave your page, or site, after not clicking anywhere else on your site. It is a metric tool that measures the quality of your web pages.

You must understand that bounce rate and exit rate are not the same. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit any page of your site without going further. They click off within seconds, or even a split second. Exit rate, on the other hand, is when people leave your site after staying for more than a few seconds. Every visitor needs to exit your website, not every one needs to bounce off.

Before you can differentiate between different types of bounce rates, you must analyze different traffic sources. You need to determine where your traffic comes from and what their bounce rates are. If your incoming traffic sources have poor bounce rates, it will reflect poorly on your rate. The largest amount of converting traffic sources include search engine traffics, email marketing campaigns and affiliate campaigns.

Analyze incoming traffic

When analyzing your incoming traffic, forget about unqualified sources such as social media sites, unknown referrer sites and random directory sites.

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for analyzing bounce rates. Combining the data obtained from Google Analytics with the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel 2013 will highlight which pages have increased bounce rates.

Increase in the bounce rate

Increased bounce rates occur for a variety of reasons including outdated and stale web content, ineffective ad-words and your competition changing tactics. Tactics include enhancing a marketing campaign, implementing effective ad-words, updating web content and reducing prices.

The effectiveness of your keywords, and phrases, will affect your bounce rate. Effective keywords, which provide visitors with information they are looking for, will result in lower bounce rates. On the other hand, if your website uses ineffective keywords, your visitor will leave as soon as they realize your site is not appropriate. Nothing is more frustrating in the Internet world than typing in a keyword or keyword phrase and being taken to a website that has nothing to do with what is being searched for.

Analyze keywords

Analyze the keywords on every page of your website with a website analyzer tool like Google Analytics. Make adjustments as needed.

Does your landing page contain action-oriented language that stimulates interest? Is the information specific and user-friendly? Is content organized optimally? Then, your bounce rate will be lower since visitors want to stay on your page. They will also be more inclined to view other pages on your site.

On the other hand, if your landing page is generalized and/or leads your visitor on a clicking search, your bounce rate will be high. Your landing page will not meet your visitor’s expectations and they will quickly leave.

ROI and Revenue

Bounce rates directly impacts your ROI and revenues. They can point out which information/pages need revisions, increase your conversion rate, highlight where you are wasting your money and help you focus in on your objectives. Are you using them to your advantage?