Bounce rate metric provides score of how the website has performed in terms of customer engagement. This number indicates the number of visitors who left the website without taking the action expected by the owner. Quality of the website, these days, is determined not only by the number of hits it receives, but also by the positive attitude that the visitor displays.
Why finding bounce rate is essential
Finding bounce rate is one of the crucial activities performed by the online marketers who want to come up with sure shot solutions for promoting the website. Thus, paying attention to this metric helps in:
a. Finding the weak areas of the website
A customer, in one of the researches, was found to be bouncing back from the check-out page every time he reached that stage. On fathoming the psyche through survey form and with customer service call, it was found that the customer wanted to buy the product, but was not given the information about the product chosen. This confused the customer and made him leave.
Thus, bringing relevant change in the checkout page helped the business achieve sales. In another case, the problem was related to the absence of payment method the customer was comfortable with. Thus, bounce rate helped find why the landing page in question did not perform the way it was expected to do.
b. Analyzing the time spent on each landing page
What is customer doing on each landing page, which areas were left the most early and which the last, helps marketers find what can be done to enhance the engagement factor of each of them. Inclusion of certain CTA buttons, more information, or online chat feature are some of the actions one can take to bring more value and quality to the website navigation. All these actions are derived from the bounce rate metric figures and ensuing corrective measures.
c. Encouraging the customers to visit more pages
Bounce rate means the visitor will leave the website right after visiting one page of the website. Thus, to achieve 0% bounce rate, the marketers need to revamp the content in such a way so that it compels the visitor to explore the website further.
Where high bounce rate is bad and where it is good
Experts claim that bounce rate means different to different types of online properties. If the online property or digital platform is a white paper or research paper kind of stuff, the bounce rate can be a matter of serious concern. The success of such platform is highly dependent on the visitor reading the whole content and take appropriate action. But, if the business is such that the person just logs on to the website, takes the phone number displayed there and closes session once done, the number of increase in leads will be reported even if the bounce rate comes out to be high.
Thus, people argue that the bounce rate is not that effective a metric. However, it cannot be ignored completely. Click here to add bounce rate metric to your online property.