Bounce rates can tell you a lot about the quality of your website and give insights into areas of improvement. We have already examined hard and soft bounces in e-mail marketing. Today, we look at what bounce rates tell you about the success of your web pages and explain the differences to exit rates.
Definition: bounce rate vs. exit rate
The so-called bounce rate is the number of web page visitors who leave the page after a certain time. No actions such as logins or link clicks were performed before leaving the site. Bounce rates hence refer to visitors who landed on your site and stayed briefly before they left again. So in order to improve the bounce rate, bounces must be prevented within a certain time.
The bounce rate is often confused with the exit rate. The exit rate includes the number of visitors who leave your site on a particular page regardless if they took action or not. The bounce rate is therefore more important for optimization measures since it better reflects the success of certain websites and topics.
Tips for lowering the bounce rate
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Responsive design
We do it all daily – go online with mobile devices. When we get to a page where we constantly need to zoom in and move the page to read the content, we are losing interest. Responsive design is the solution!
Depending on the theme or structure of your web pages, other possibilities for optimization may arise. It is now clear that you can learn important information from your bounce rates. In order to be able to analyze and interpret these more precisely, you should consult further key figures for your website.
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Interaction
Interactive content such as videos motivates users to interact more with your website. Videos are also easier to read than texts, which is why users are more likely to watch a video than read a long text. But be careful: Large videos with long loading times can also increase the bounce rate.
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Bounce rate in the context of other metrics
Information from which website users visit a particular page can provide insights regarding the bounce rate. For example, if you link to the page from a social media post and visitors coming from this source bounce particularly often, this is an indication that your post might rise different expectations than what people actually see when visiting the page.
These tips provide only some clues that can be investigated. Depending on the theme or structure of your website, other possibilities for optimization may arise. It is now clear that you can learn important information from your bounce rates. In order to analyze and interpret these more closely, you should always consult other key figures for your website.
