Bounce Rate, in Detail.

The acceptable  Bounce Rate is between 40-60%.

One must note difference between the bounce rate of the Home Page and landing Page.

‘Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=81986

First, let’s take a look at the problem from a theoretical standpoint: Is a high bounce rate bad? When is a high bounce rate something you don’t need to worry about? While each algorithm package has a slightly different technical definition of bounce rate, a bounce means that a person came to the website, viewed one page, and left. However, assuming this is always a “bad thing” is a bit naive. Sometimes the page answers a person’s question, solves their problem, or gives them the information they wanted. It does such a good job that users don’t need to do anything else. Want an example? I run some travel websites. As we know, airlines and government websites often have horrible SEO and architecture. So I often take the top questions people are searching for and create a collected FAQ page for these queries. One of my pages has a high bounce rate of over 85%. However, by using a service like crazyegg, I can track clicks on the print button. Over 45% of the people who visit the page print it. It’s pretty hard to say that page isn’t doing its job.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/high-bounce-rate-bad/

Bounce rate is a very important metric for website owners. It basically tells you what percentage of your visitors are “bouncing” away after landing on your site (e.g., they just visit one page and leave before clicking on to a second page inside your site). A bounce can occur for several reasons, including:

• The visitor hit the “Back” button on his browser.
• The visitor closed his browser.
• The visitor clicked on one of your ads.
• The visitor clicked on one of your external links.
• The visitor used the search box on his browser.
• The visitor typed a new URL on his browser.

All the actions above would cause the visitor to leave your site. Provided he did any of these actions right after arriving at your site (and before clicking on to a second page), it would be counted as a bounce. In fact the formula for finding the bounce rate on your website is:

 Bounce rate = Visits that left after one page / Total number of visits

For example, if during a certain month your site received 120,000 visits, out of which 80,000 bounced after visiting just one page, your bounce rate for that month would be 80,000 divided by 120,000, which equals to 0.66 (or 66%). Notice that you can calculate the bounce rate of your whole website or of single pages inside it.

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/what-is-bounce-rate/

If you have an engaging content and a simple design you might get a good bounce rate below the 40% mark.

Reduce Bounce Rate.

Smooth Navigation

Smooth and simple navigation is necessary to enhance the user experience. Linking one web page to another helps in reducing the bounce rate of the website to a very far extent. The intention is to help the users extract the required information with an ease. 

Do not add unwanted elements

Suppose your website contains relevant information, appropriate images and essential call to action tools and suddenly a pop up ad appears, your ardent efforts to enhance your users’ experience may get hampered in a very short instant and thus distract the users’ attention from your website.This results in high bounce rate. Hence, it is advisable to exclude such elements.

Eye catchy taglines

Taglines/ headlines are the first elements that the users come across while reading a web page, an article etc. A headline is essentially the gist of what follows and should propel the readers to read further.On another note, key word rich headlines help in improving the search engine ranking of that page. If your headline is able to catch the eye of the readers, it automatically lowers the bounce rate of a website.

Website compatible with different browsers

Browser compatibility is one of the most important factors in reducing the bounce rate of a website.  

Make sure that your website is compatible with every web browser.

Encourage the users to take an action.

Users participation is an essential factor to establish a strong brand identity, to improve your sales, to keep the users abreast of the latest in your company or industry, to uphold the interests of the users etc. This can be achieved with the aid of video clips, audio clips, live chat, discussions, answering questions, leave a comment section etc. All these activities helps in reducing bounce rate the bounce rate of a website.

Use re-directions where necessary.

Don’t overload with images

Do not overcrowd your website with unrelated images as it makes the website heavy and thus have a negative effect on the bounce rate of a website.

Read WordPress Blogs and watch the tutorial.