How we managed to have Bounce Rate less than 5% in 6 months
One of the key performance index of a web page is to have lower bounce rate. You must read this article if:
- Bounce rate is new term for you and you don't know its impact.
- You are having hard time to measure and understand the Bounce rate of your web page.
- You have no idea how to lower the bounce rate.
"A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session." - Google
Higher bounce rate means that you having lots of unhappy visitors, it simply implies that visitor did not liked your page.
Why is it Bad?
User leaving your website can't be good, and if the visitor leaves by just seeing one page, it could cause a trouble for your website.
Not only bounce rate is considered among the key metrics in Google Ranking Factors, it also tells you that visitors are not able to navigate on your website.
Imagine if a human is having difficulty in navigating, can you assume a crawler can index your website smoothly, the answer is NO.
Industry Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates
- Content Websites: 40-60%
- Lead Generation: 30-50%
- Blogs: 70-98%
- Retail Sites: 20-40%
- Service Sites: 10-30%
- Landing/Home Pages: 70-90%
This may look good, but you know what's better than good, its awesome.
We at www.traveldglobe.com not only matched the industry standards, but we achieved a really kick ass numbers in terms of bounce rates.
We were at par the industry standards at the start of the year 2017. We set a target to create an extraordinary and super cool UX for a travel planning website. Our 2 focus points were
- Super smooth navigation without noise.
- A UX that exactly match our user persona.
Super Smooth Navigation without noise
The most crucial element for any website is the navigation and internal linking. We have tweaked the navigation elements both on mobile and desktop websites.
Bottom Nav Bar in Mobile Website
Replicating the mobile app behaviour, so that the page will give them a familiar ux and easy to reach internal pages.
Reduced the bounce rate on mobile from 40% to 6%
Navigation menu in the header, the top results were placed right in the header. This is good for both SEO and the visitors. We are doing AB testing with two headers, the one with the menu has increased the average pages per session from 2.3 to 2.9
No one wants that visitors leaving their website, we asking them why are they leaving the website. Though many visitors had not answered this question, but clicked on the close icon and continued exploring the page. This also yield for us leading Average time spent on the page from 2.1 minutes to 3.5 minutes.
An User Experience that exactly match our user persona
Our website is made for the Indian users, to understand the need and behaviour of the Indian users, we interviewed 300 people that matched our user persona(Upcoming Blog).
Our visitors wanted 3 things and we delivered them all.
- Critical Information(Prices, Time, Inclusions and Call to Action) without scroll
- Interact with a human(chat or call)
- Weird Things
These critical changes has let us achieve the lowest bounce rate in travel industry. We did what our visitors and customers asked us.
"If you have to ask me what you have to do, I would say just love your customers."
