Bounce Rate Basics

If you have a website you should be taking an interest in the amount and quality of traffic that is hitting your site. You spend energy, time, marketing efforts and money for this valuable traffic. Do you know what your bounce rate is?

Bounce rate is referred to when a visitor comes to your site and then leaves before visiting any other pages within the site or doesn’t stay for very long. This means they either did not find something interesting to keep them there, or they did not find a reason to click on any other page or article with in your site. This means you spent the money getting someone to your site and they left with only a slight impression of your brand.

The first step is to find out what your bounce rate is. Use Google Analytics to get this information right away. The second step is to create something on your site that will motivate the viewer to stay, shop, or better yet give you their contact information.

A common method is to offer something of value to the viewer for free if they will tell you a little bit about themselves. Normally this is a downloadable document of some kind in exchange for their name and email (hubspot.com does this all the time). My recommendation is to make sure this free information is VERY valuable. Yes. Give some of your most valuable information for FREE. If I am interested in your product or service and you offer me very valuable information at no cost I am much more likely to engage with you further and pay you for something else that you are offering.

Another helpful method is the utilization of a video with a very interesting title and content. Entice me to click on the play button and hear what you have to say. This video needs to be very valuable, informative and engaging. After the viewer has seen your video they need to know more about you and what you can do for them. They should trust you more after they view the video.

Test, test, test… Try different free products, different videos and so on. You will find that different strategies work better on specific markets or lead sources. Once you have discovered which strategy works best for each of your lead sources, accommodate those leads by presenting them with the form of media and type of information that seems to best suit them.

Bounce rate is very important in determining the future of your marketing and web development strategies. Continually monitoring this very important metric can save very valuable resources by helping you to detect early success or failure of particular marketing strategies related to each lead source.

For this and other articles by Brad Hess please visit http://www.mymark.com/blog. Brad Hess is CEO and Founder of MyMark. I made my mark with MyMark, providers of an integrated personal profile, blog, and home base for professionally branding you. This original post can be found at http://www.mymark.com/blog/bradhess/2010/07/26/bounce-rate-basics/