Bounce Rate

We’ve been thinking a lot about our sites, how to better engage our visitors and how to reduce our ‘bounce rate.’

Effective November 2008 we made changes to our blog site that brought some phenomenal results, including a dramatically decreased ‘bounce rate’ AND an impressive increase in total page views. In fact, ever since those changes we’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate of approximately 60+% and a simultaneous increase in page views of over 500%. And those results have remained consistent for 4 months running!

Wikipedia says, “A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages.” Bounce rate is obviously good when the percentage is very low, bad when it is high. It can be an effective measure of traffic quality OR it can be a dose of reality for how poorly you engage visitor traffic. These metrics are available with most any website analytics software and are important as you look to improve your advertorial business blog. And remember, when people search or follow back links to you they may arrive on any page. So far as Google is concerned, all content is important to their search index… not just that on your home page!

Reducing Bounce Rate

Because our bounce rates were so high we felt, inevitably, that it was translating to lost lead opportunities. After all, can ‘one and done’ visits equate to much in the way of leads? Clearly we had to improve, so we started to look at our sites, the presentation of various content and, generally, at raising the ‘status quo.’ Admittedly it was basic analytic data that gave us the heads’ up, but with regards to decisions we made about change… we mostly fell back on logic & experience.

With our home page we pursued a less traditional blog ‘look & feel’, going part website and part dynamic blog.

OLD HOME PAGE

NEW HOME PAGE

And then we also wanted to have lead capture forms where ever possible, offering education & instruction for basic contact information.

Less Bounce Rate = More Page Views, Leads and New Business

One influential blogger recently referred to bounce rate and his blog saying “With blogs people come mostly only to read your latest post, they’ll read it and then they’ll leave.”

While we used to agree, based upon a more democratic presentation of content and information we’re feeling pretty much the opposite these days. We’ve got a lot to learn here and we’ll report back while we do, but as bounce rates decrease and visitors find reasons to go deeper into our content… we’re definitely driving more page views, qualified leads and new business.

We wanted different categories of content, our ‘Business Bloggers Bible’ ebook offer and other free educational tips positioned where they were much more visible.