How do you reduce Bounce Rate?

What is a bounce rate?

Simply put these are people who visited your site; gave your site a ‘kick in the butt’ and walked out! Your Website did not even deserve 1 click from this bracket of visitors.

How do you now work towards lowering your bounce rate in a strategic manner?

Target the right audience:

Even if you know what you’re audience is; are you’re keywords; paid ads and overall targeting reaching the right audience?

If you are an upscale branded hotel and you’re ad appears for a search term like” hotel in Delhi with girl”; it is scary. But you will be shocked to know how many hotels actually show up for that.

Let’s explain that through an example; there was a hotel that included the term “Hotel in Delhi” as a broad term match in the keyword list for paid ads. A Broad Term match is where search keywords with terms before, after and in between will also be eligible to throw up your ad. Example of a prefix- “Great hotel in Delhi”- your ad is likely to appear. Similarly for terms in between like “Budget hotel for restaurant in Delhi”, your ad is still eligible to appear. Or suffix- “Hotel in Delhi near CP”- still eligible to appear. This means that the same keyword is also eligible for a search term like “hotel in Delhi with girl”. And you can still carry out the search with that term on the most popular search engine and you will be shocked to notice how many reputed brands will feature their ads for that search term.

This can be scary for a hotel’s brand image! This does not mean that the hotel isn’t sensitive to their brand, but they are probably just not aware that their ad shows up for a lot of search terms or audience they aren’t really wanting to target!

There are multiple ways to make sure you are reaching to the right audience. And if you have outsourced this to a vendor; make sure you are auditing this enough …

Optimize Landing Pages:

Imagine that you search for “ shaving gel” as a keyword on the search engine page, go to a site listed amongst the results and you land up on a page that features “ deodorants” that they offer. The first reaction will be that you bounce off! Which are the pages that are bouncing visitors off and why?

This means the ad is not optimized for the landing page. The ads that appear need to make sure they appear for the right keywords. That way you only waste impressions and burn up more money!

Task Completion Rate:

This is a qualitative analysis of your website. On your Website; you must have a survey or questionnaire with maybe just 2 questions:-

1. Why did you come on the website today?
2. Were you able to achieve what you were looking for?

And this is because; say for example to a hotel site; many visitors may be coming on for any of the following reasons:

1. For having a look at the restaurants you have,
2. For looking at your address
3. To have a look at the photos of your hotel, the rooms you have etc.,

For reasons 1 and 2; the visitor is probably not going to book a room at all, but has still completed his task and it says your site is useful. You cannot measure category 1 and 2 under the conversion rate metric; because they will simply not book a room. So to improvise on your bounce rate; make sure you get a qualitative and quantitate (conversion rate) assessment of your website.

Once you have an assessment of the above 3; dig deeper into analytics to revive information and work towards improving your Website and lowering your bounce rate!