Bounce traffic analysis and recommendations

[silveraden]

Bounce Traffic in Google Analytics means a visitor is leaving the same page where he landed. For example, a visitor visit your homepage and after spending sometime, he left without clicking any internal link.

Bounce traffic can be considered good or bad depending on the visitor's activity on your site's page. The amount of time a visitor is spending on a single page does not have any effect on bounce traffic rate. Whether he stay for 5 hours or leave immediately, it could be considered as bounce traffic if he did not click on any internal link before he leave.


Bounce Traffic can be considered bad if a visitor left your page because he did not found useful information, or he didn't like the content. On the other hand, bounce traffic can be considered good if a visitor spend more than 5 minutes in your site's page and reading its content. But because the visitor is already satisfied of what he found, he don't need to click or visit other page anymore.

Let's focus on bad bounce and we will analyze and convert them into good traffic.

There are several factors affecting bad bounce traffic. These factors can be considered controllable or not depending on the nature the bounce traffic occur.

Browser Compatibility
Looking at the following image, you can actually identify that IE has a high percentage compared to Firefox. Though the number of IE users is smaller compared to Firefox, most of them actually left the site without visiting other links. Myseoblog.net actually had problem with IE before and the bounce rate had reached 90% because no IE user can view any page. After I change the theme, the bounce rate on IE has been decreasing since then. It is highly recommended that you should always check your site with at least 5 browsers (Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Netscape). These browsers are compatible with Windows and you can download these software online for free.

Traffic Source
Visitors referred by Google organic search varies depending on what the searchers are looking for. Most visitors referred by Google are looking for a very specific information so the bounce percentage could vary from very low to very high. If the visitor cannot find what he is looking for, he will immediately move to another Google search result. On the other hand, if he found the exact information, he will stay on the page more longer. Both can result to a bounce traffic.

It is actually difficult to analyze the activity of visitors referred by Google. Visitors referred by links always have lower bounce rate. They are expecting to see the content that is described on the link they clicked so they always search the site for additional or related information. Visitors referred directly by specific sites or blog posts are highly targeted, stays longer on your site, and has a very low bounce rate.

Site Layout
No visitor will stay on a site with crappy lay-out, unbalanced colors and backgrounds, and broken pages.I always prefer page where you can read the articles without any interference like pop-up ads, or any non-related graphics.I immediately leave a page where I cannot find what I expect to see because of interstitial and pop-up advertisements.

Site Server Speed
I know I have a slower server speed so I removed all 3rd party java scripts running at Myseoblog.net (except of course for Adsense and Analytics). I usually do not continue viewing a page that does not load within 8 seconds. The acceptable limit actually is 5 seconds but many sites with lots of scripts loads more than 10 seconds. This is not advisable if you are targeting loyal visitors.

Links
If your page just have plain article without any internal link, a visitor might close his browser and totally leave your site without visiting other pages. But if you have some related or interesting inner links, there is 90% chance that a visitor who is reading the content will click on the inner link.

Content
Still, content is king and there should be no further explanation on this. If your site has an excellent content, no visitor will leave without checking your other pages.

Further Analysis on Myseoblog'net Previous Traffic.

Relation of Bounce Rate to Average Time on Site.
The image below shows the relation of bounce rate to average time on site. Having a low bounce rate is not good if the visitor just took a glance at your site then left.

Sitepoint and Dslreports (as referrers) on the image below have very good performance. The bounce rate is average but the average time on site is more than 4 minutes. There is no standard of what to be the acceptable average time on site but for me, 2 minutes and above is acceptable.

On the other hand, Pinoyexchange and Yahoo Answers contributed a very bad traffic. Visitors left the site without doing anything and with higher bounce rate. Average time on page of 33 seconds and 18 seconds are real waste of bandwidth.

New vs Returning Visitors (or subscribers). Unique visitors are important but in terms of quality of traffic, returning visitors carry a wide margin. Looking at image below, returning visitors has low bounce rate because they always scan the whole site for new updates. For this reason, you must take care of your subscribers.

Traffic Origin
Another contributor to bounce rate is the origin of traffic. The image below shows that Americans and Canadians are always in hurry. Or maybe they read faster than other Non-English speakers.. LOL. Malaysians on the other hand stays longer and digging the pages.

Conclusion and Suggestions
Though most of factors affecting bad bounce traffic are uncontrollable, the success of the website still lies on the hands of admin/webmaster. Here are some simple tips on how to lower bad bounce traffic. This is just a summary of the above statements.

• Make sure your site is compatible with at least 5 major browsers (Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Netscape)
• Make sure to select a host than can load your site in not more than 5 seconds.
• Have a good site design. Have your site reviewed by other people in Namepros, Digitalpoint, or Warrior forum. Ask their opinion about your layout and overall design. Ask them about your site's speed as well.
• Analyze your traffic daily, know the sources, and remove those advertising practices that brings you bounce traffic.
• Enhance your advertising method that brings real and low-bounce traffic.
• Always put hyperlinks in your articles. You may highlight important keywords and link it to your other related articles.
• Write great contents (I cannot explain how but you know it already when you are not copying someone's article).

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