March 13, 2008
Optimizing Content: Ideas on Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who arrive to any page on a Web site, then leave immediately from that site without going any deeper into the site. There are a few posible reasons for this to happen and strategies to deal with each:
1. Page performance: The page might have too much content on it or images whose file size is too big. Check this by looking at every image to see that it is below a reasonable file size. You might find that you have a very large image that could be scaled down to fit. Also, you might consider 'paging' the page, or splitting it into several pages in sequence that the viewer can click through. If its engaging content, they will click to the next page. If it isn't, you need to consider cutting/editing.
2. Site performance: There may be a lag in server performance so that the viewer just gets impatient and bounces out. There are a number of products and online services that you can use to check the latency of your server (ex. http://visualroute.visualware.com/), but only if the problem is across your site and not isolated to one page's performance (in which case refer to #1 above). If you have a webmaster or technologist managing your Web platform, you'll want to refer this issue to them.
3. Content issues: This is something you can and should do something about, and there are a few of them, one of which you might not like to hear.
a. Issues with content tags: You may have keyphrases or tags in the article or on the Web page that are getting picked up by Google but are not intrinsically germane to the piece. For instance, if you have a catchy article title "Expressing Yourself" on a parenting site about expressing milk, but someone was searching for sites that would help them learn to express themselves better verbally, that would probably result in a bounce (unless of course the Web surfer happened to also need to find ways to feed their baby while out of the house). This can be remedied by changing the title to conform better to the keyphrase sweet spots of your brand.
Another example would be if you apply keywords that are not appropriate. For instance, if I were to put a keyword tag "Drupal tutorial" on a page to try to get traffic and Google picked that up, if the person that found my page saw that they weren't going to get a tutorial, they'd bounce out (and perhaps never return).
b. Issues with the content itself: This one is hardest for people to accept, but sometimes the content on your (or my!) site just plain sucks or isn't that useful, or it's redundant to whatever else is out there. People aren't looking at content as the final piece in the puzzle anymore. The Web is about the synthesis of billions of ideas and concepts and facts, and people are moving rapidly around to find pieces to put together. This is in seconds, not hours like when we were kids going to the library and browsing the card catalogs.
One thing you might want to do is look carefully at your content, or have a friend or colleague critique it. Is that page saying anything unique, or valuable, or just plain novel/interesting? What do your competitors say about the similar offering they have, whether you are a service or product company? If you're a publisher, are there competitive sites with better public data about page views that you might look at to see what their editorial slant was on a particular story? Do you have sufficient images or video or other content of note? Is the story too long so that people 'crap out' halfway through reading it? With regard to that last one, maybe people DID find it interesting, but they had to jump to something else. This is the artistry of the Web and the beauty of that is that you can 'lovingly handcraft' content until you get it -- then apply what you learned to future content that you produce.
4. Give them More: Maybe the issue with the page isn't about tags or performance or even the content. Maybe that story or BLOG or whatever was AWESOME, but the viewer was just done (sated, as it were). Perhaps they came from Digg or Technorati or wherever, read the content, then split. What might help there is if you put a zone (or block or whatever you want to call the area on your page) that has related content links, or some teaser into content that is popular. Perhaps an offer of some sort, or even a question/poll about whether something was helpful might lead the reader to another area of the site that they might find useful.
Obviously none of this matters if you're not in the business of increasing your page views (if you sell advertising for instance) or increase brand loyalty (if you are selling products or services, etc), or just plain want people to stick to your site. However, one caution: I would not go crazy touching every page on your site. If you implement some analytics product like GoogleAnalytics or Omniture or the like, they will all allow you to sort by pages with the highest bounce rate. Start with the ones with bounce rates between 75-100% -- those are in bad shape. If you have time, go over the ones with 50% and higher bounce rate.
I want to make sure that you understand that this isn't going to fix your general issues around site stickiness, but it is a 'low hanging fruit' way to keep people engaged and coming back. If you try these suggestions, please check back on those pages you tweak, then post back comments to let me know how they worked. If you've got other suggestions to post, that would be great if you did so here.
Posted at 09:33 am by Joseph Bachana
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