Trisha Amable
Feb 20, 20226 min
less than 15 second? or more than this about 5 minutes
15 second is roughly the average time spent on your website at any given moment. Therefore this is where the window of opportunity lie to capture someone's attention on your website.
If you haven't generated interest in 15 seconds and have not manage to grab their attention for 5 minutes, then you probably aren't going to.
First we need to look at some major reasons why people leave a website and how you can capture their attention instead. You'll be surprise to find out that it all comes down to your bounce rate.
Why should you care about your bounce rate because it can help you determine why your visitors leaves.
Bounce rate is one of those deceiving marketing terms that kind of sound fun; like a bouncing ball but it's not.
Brian Dean from BACKLINKO recently advice that we should focus on "Dwell Time" that is how long a visitor spend on your content, rather than vanity metrics like pageviews, like, vote and so on. Creating quality content is extremely important because Google cares about how deep people navigate into your site, whether they hit the back button, and worst of all, whether they return to search results page because they didn't find the information they were looking for.
This picture is a screenshot from Google Analytic this where you can find out your bounce rate percentage. Just log in to your Google Analytic account and find the option Audience Overview then click on it and the page will load with your data for your domain name. If you have two domains you will need to go the top drop down menu and select the website you want the information for.
If you want to view the information by page in your Google Analytic account go to Behaviour Overview and click on it. The page will display the information for each page and you can see your bounce rate % per page.
There is two way to lower your bounce rate is by upping the engagement on your page. In my honest opinion as a professional website designer is to look at it from a traffic perspective and from a page perspective.
If you website has high bounce rate, then most likely your visitors expectations are not met. Let's say you're running an ad on Google, and most people coming to your site is through the ad you running on Google. However, most people coming from that ad bounce.
This mean you are not living up to your customers expectations. You need to review the page content the ads link too, as the ads content may not match the page content the ads pertains too. You need to ensure that the page has a logical flow with the ad.
Your ad in the first place should have the content of your page in a succinct targeted content way that when people clicked on it they are redirected to the product or service page the ads content refer too.
If your page lives up to the expectations of your visitors, and the page still has a high bounce rate, then you have to look at the page itself.
How’s the usability of the page?
Is there a call-to-action above the fold on the page?
Do you have internal links that point to related pages or posts?
Do you have a menu that’s easy to use and say exactly what you provide?
Does the page invite people to look further on your site?
These are all things you need to consider when optimizing your page content to attract visitors to dwell on your site. Website Design mostly overlook and it is an essential tool for business communication and business success. Therefore it is important to know how to design a good website that attracts visitors and increase dwell time and eventually purchase your goods and services or read your blog article, listen to your podcast, increase referral and enquiries.
We encourage you to read the ultimate website design guide to increase user engagement if you want to increase your bounce rate and attract dwell time. This comprehensive article corroborate neatly with this article content and you'll learn why it is important that your website content addresses your visitors expectation.
A website's bounce rate is the percentage of people who have landed on your website and do not browse any further. Therefore the bounce rate represent a single page view only.
The following picture from Neil Patel owner's of KISSmetrics shows the equation Google uses to calculate your bounce rate percentage.
It is important not to confuse your website Exit Rate with your Bounce Rate because they are two different metrics that Google Analytics uses for your website and both numbers affect your ranking from an SEO perspective.
The bounce rate is frequently mistaken for the exit rate. Literally, the exit rate is the percentage of page views that were the last in the session. This determine the users deciding to end their session on your website on a particular page.
It says something about users deciding to end their session on your website on that particular page. Google’s support page gives some clear examples of the exit rates and bounce rates, which make the difference very clear. This example was taken directly from their page and we added colour so you can view the page bounce and exit page better in each page example:
Monday: Page B > Page A > Page C > Exit - this lead to dwell time exit
Tuesday: Page B > Exit - this lead to a bounce
Wednesday: Page A > Page C > Page B > Exit - this lead to dwell time exit
Thursday: Page C > Exit - this lead to a bounce
Friday: Page B > Page C > Page A > Exit - this lead to dwell time exit
The % Exit and Bounce Rate calculations are:
Exit Rate of each page:
A: 33% (3 sessions included Page A, 1 session exited from Page A)
B: 50% (4 sessions included Page B, 2 sessions exited from Page B)
C: 50% (4 sessions included Page C, 2 sessions exited from Page C)
Bounce Rate of each page:
A: 0% (one session began with Page A, but that was not a single-page session, so it has no Bounce Rate)
B: 33% (Bounce Rate is less than Exit Rate, because 3 sessions started with Page B, with one leading to a bounce and one leading to an exit)
C: 100% (one session started with Page C, and it lead to a bounce)
Understanding how the bounce rate and exit rate are calculate can support you improve and optimise your website page content to increase dwell time on your website and lower your bounce rate greatly. You can see clearly that a number of pages can be visited by a users this will affect your exit rate. Knowing that your visitors browsing on your website in term of Marketing it is good to have an exit survey to capture there experiences on your website. It is best not to have a pop up but you could have a button Saying "we value your opinion - fill our short survey"
We have on our website under the browser bar a display bar that attract and captivate the users coming to our site with three call-to-action with its text displaying the action we want the user to take when they click on the button. They are visible on every pages of our website and the colour use attract the users eyes to these buttons. View our bar and tell us what you think in the comment sections.
The bottom line is an unoptimized website design will cause a high bounce rate, as well as a poorly design website, a website that are not updated regularly, a website that has information in huge block text leaving no design space, a website that has barely any information, a website with slow loading time, a website where the content does not match the product or service provision, a website that as way to much content and the users has to scroll forever to look for the information, a website with a poor link structure, no call to action and more lead to a high bounce rate this is why user leave your website.
In this case you need to optimise your page content and never fear at Girlfridayz we provide you with a solution to these problems mentioned above with our Yearly Website Subscription where we update your website monthly to ensure it remains optimise and visitors stay and dwell on your website which would increase your ranking on search engine.
Do not confuse the users leaving because they have purchased a product or service or browse your website and leave with an intent to purchase later or return to win your prize offer or play your game, view your video or return to read your blog because they have learn from the article... the latter will affect your exit rate not your bounce rate per se.
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