What is Bounce Rate? Seven easy steps to decrease the Bounce Rate of your Wordpress blog or website.

In order to run a successful website you should know your site metrics. One key metric you should be aware of is Bounce Rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. This entrance can be from any page on your site. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages are not relevant to your visitors.

If you haven’t been tracking your users, you should start now. Google Analytics is free and awesome. Google Analytics - You can sign up here

To view the bounce rates for your website using Google Analytics. Sign in and go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.

Why monitoring Bounce Rate Metrics is important?

Lets assume you own a physical electronics store.To run your store successfully you will require a lot of foot traffic and once your customers arrive you want them to make transactions. Or at least surf the store, you never know as they can find something interesting and useful while surfing that they would like to buy.

Same rule applies to the online world and this process of getting more traffic and converting them to sales is called conversion. You invite customers to your website by investing both time and money on good content, email and affiliate marketing, paid search etc. And once your online users hit your website you would like to capitalize on that investment. 

Now this is where Bounce Rate Metric comes in handy. By measuring the bounce rate you can measure the effectiveness of your promotional marketing efforts. As you follow this metric at the landing page or the traffic source levels you can establish a baseline to track your success overtime.

We all spend a lot of money on conversions and this metrics can tell us where we are we acquiring quality traffic from and how successful we are on converting that traffic to sales or at the least have users stay on the site.

Bounce Rate metrics can be affected by a number of different variables. On an average bounce rate for your site should fall between 40 - 70%.  You can not convince all the site traffic to stay but if your Bounce Rate is more then 70% you are doing something wrong.

Bounce rate is a  great qualifying metric. Its a metric that helps you ask the right questions. Check the top web pages of your website from where people are entering the site and check there bounce rate. Remember as these pages are from where most of your online users are entering your site, you can determine by studying these pages if these pages are doing a good job.

How to bring down or decrease the bounce rate of your WordPress blog or website?

There are a number of measures that we can take to grab attention and compel users to stay on the site and thus decrease the bounce rate. I call them triggers or call to actions. Following are some of the steps that I follow rigorously and have been successful in decreasing the Bounce Rate for coolwebdeveloper.com over a period of time -

• Interesting Headline - Keep the title of your post interesting and should ignite quest to read the full post.
• Interactive Posts - Make your posts interactive by encouraging users to click on other useful links within your site. For example if you are writing a post on HP laptop, you can refer to previous posts you have written about HP laptop in this new article thus providing more options to your users.
• Best or Related Posts - Make sure your users can reach the Best or Related Posts from every page of your site.
  Wordpress Plugin you can use - Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• BLOG’s design and SEO - Reconsider your blog’s navigation and overall theme design that could generate usability issues.

Thesis WordPress Theme has the following functions automatically built in, so you do not need to use these plugins if you are using this theme. Just as an FYI - This theme is already getting some great reviews around the blogosphere (you can see some testimonials here). You can download Thesis Wordpress Theme here.

But if you are using other themes, the following plugins will give you a similar look/effect.

• All in One SEO Pack - This plugin makes it easy for you to optimize your article titles and other meta tags. 
• Google Analytics - This plugin makes it easy for you to insert your Google Analytics code and start tracking your blog visitors.
• WP-Note - This plugin lets you insert notes in your article to make them stand out. Kind of similar to the yellow colored notes I have twice in this article.
• Wordpress Gravatars - This plugin lets you display Gravatars of your readers in the comments section and can put your Gravatar on top of your article to show who the article was written by.

• Error page - Make sure to use a 404 landing page on your blog or website. Users will hit this page if any link on your site is broken or not found. Using this page you can suggest your users about possible areas of site that can visit and might be interested in.
• Navigation - Easy to spot link to the Home Page. Use breadcrumbs feature for easier navigation. Categories and Posts should be easily visible on the site.
  WordPress Plugin you can use - Breadcrumb Navigation
• Not using relevant tags - One of the reasons why a lot of blogger’s and website owners have a high bounce rate is NOT using relevant tags while writing posts. Tag relevancy is very important. Users coming through Google or other sources are expecting to get the result based on there search keywqords. If you tags are not relevant, your bounce rate will definitely be higher. 
• Incentive Offers - If you have something to give away like Free themes, free e-books, free reports etc then you will always be able attract visitors to click on that link.
• Interactive Elements - Use interactive elements that would require users to take small actions, such as polls.

By following these check points consistently you will be able to reduce the Bounce Rate of your site.

Do you have a high or a low bounce rate? How has the bounce rate affected your blog? What methods did you find most efficient to reduce the bounce rate? If you have suggestions or want to discuss more about Bounce Rate please leave your comments.