Google Analytics:Understand Bounce Rates and Use to Your Advantage

Google Analytics is an awesome tool that is provided absolutely free of cost by Google. Despite being so outstanding and efficient, it is a sad fact that many of the users do not quite understand the various features.

Lack of understanding of how Google Analytics works prevents such users from realizing the full potential of this brilliant tool. In this hub you will find simple and easy to digest explanation of the various features found in Google analytics. I suggest that you bookmark this hub use it as quick reference whenever you open your Google Analytics page.

Bounce rate can be explained in a variety of ways but the aim of creating this hub is to simplify the understanding. So let us focus on the word ‘bounce’ for now. The word bounce is usually associated with a ball. What does a ball do when it bounces? It reflects back from the wall or ground where it hits right?

Similarly a bounce occurs when a visitor enters your website via a particular page and leaves your site without visiting any other page. If this visitor enters via home page and clicks the back button to leave your site, then it is a bounce. But if he / she chooses to visit an additional page on your site, then it is not included in the calculation of bounce rate; rather it contributes towards exit rate.

If 10 visitors have entered your site via a specific page (for example your home page), and 6 of them push the back button and leave your site, while the remaining 4 click on other pages and stick around on your site, then your bounce rate is 60 %

It goes without saying that having more people bounce off your site without sticking around to explore other pages is definitely not a great thing for your site. But this cannot be used as a blanket statement for every kind of website.

Some sites may have lots of outward links and may actually encourage higher bounce rates. For example if your website only has a single landing page and nothing else, then it will have 100 % bounce rate (all those who enter have to exit via the same page). This is often the case with sales pages which have links to a purchase page on ClickBank or maybe a link to an affiliate site.

But if you have lots of pages and lots of additional information on your site and yet your bounce rate is high, it sure is a matter of concern.

As mentioned above, visitors bouncing off despite being offered lot of additional pages to check out, indicates that they are not happy with what they find on your site. This could either be due to poor content or maybe incorrect matching of search results. For example, if the visitor used ‘Google analytics’ as the search key phrase to reach your site, but could not find any relevant and worthwhile information on it, then it is only logical to hit the back button and flee.

There is another feature on the Google analytics dashboard called ‘average time on page’. This gives you an idea about the time that your visitors are spending on your page. It is a good thing for people to spend more time on each page, because it shows that they are taking time to read your articles or check out the information / products that are displayed on your page.

As discussed in # 5 above, if visitors are not sticking around and your bounce rate is high it is a matter of concern. But don’t panic already; take a long look at the average time on page as well. If your bounce rate is 60 % for one of your pages, but the average time on page is in minutes and not in seconds, then I think that is not as bad as having a high bounce rate with very low time spent on page.

Such readings mean that though visitors are bouncing off from one of your pages, yet they are reading the information on that page before leaving (good news!) But if it is the other way around with high bounce rate and low average time, it means that your page is not worthy of holding your visitors’ attention. In simple words, do something to improve the content on that page and tempt your future visitors to stay longer.

No matter how detailed the explanation about bounce rate, you are bothered only about one thing and that is exactly why you are checking this hub out. You want to know how these bounce rate, average page on time and other such features on Google analytics can be used to your advantage. Okay so here is the juicy information; focus here!

1) Take a look at your page analytics and find out which pages have high (more than 50 %) bounce rate. Try to stand in your readers’ or visitors’ shoes and now review the content and design on this page. You will get a fair idea of what is driving them away. Find this ‘visitor repellent’ and fix it as soon as you can. If it is low quality, error ridden content; rewrite it to a better quality. If it is ‘visitor unfriendly design’, dump it right away and get somebody to redesign the site for you.

2) Take a long look at the pages with low bounce rate too. Try to understand what makes these pages special enough to attract your visitors and keep them longer. Now try to replicate whatever these ‘visitor attractive’ pages are doing on the pages that are ‘visitor repellent’.

3) Visitors are more often than not put off by ads on the pages. But as publishers, many of us depend upon ads as a source of income from the site. There is no reason to push the panic button yet and remove all ads.

Visitors are actually quite tolerant of ads and get put off by them only in certain situations. The first situation is where there is an overdose of ads, with the content being literally hidden between loads of ads. The next situation is where you use pop-up ads or ads that are quite unattractive to look at and spoil the aesthetics of the site completely.

Ads are no doubt an important part of income for your website, but do not allow them to ruin your visitor experience because ultimately it is traffic that matters.

Google Analytics provides us with free information that could very well be sold for hundreds of dollars. You are spared of spending money to access this high value information. Why not spend some time and effort in understanding more about this tool and how it could help to improve your business online?