Bounce Rate vs Drop Off: How to Fix It?

Are you struggling to increase traffic to your site, or drive engagement?

Chances are a high bounce rate could prevent you from reaching your goals of growing your business. When a visitor bounces off your landing page, a lot of work needs in terms of stopping this from happening.

Our team of SEO experts know exactly what is best for your site.

There is more than one way to improve the engagement rate and reduce the bounce rate. You can improve the conversion rates by including more than one landing page. Experts point out that an increasing bounce rate on your landing page is the sign that you need to rethink your content marketing strategy.

An improved bounce rate means an increased conversion rate.

Drop-off rate

The drop-off rate, or otherwise referred to as exit rate, is not the bounce rate. However, both can be used to analyze the percentage of sessions ending on a page.

While a drop-off rate is applicable to single-page and multi-page sessions, bounce rate applies to single-page sessions on your website. Bounce rate helps to measure the ratio between a single page and all sessions.

What are the differences between bounce rate and drop-off rate?

With the drop-off rate, you have the percentage of all the page views that was the last in the session. Bounce rate gives you insights into the percentage of sessions – where the entrance page was the only page view in the session. Bounce rates for a page are applicable for sessions that start with that specific page.

(But your aim is not for achieving zero bounce rates. Having a good bounce rate is equally important for the success of your site.)

How to achieve a good bounce rate for a website?

You can start working to bring down the bounce rate of your website. When it comes to e-commerce, higher bounce rates do not seem to have an impact on your website’s goals. However, it is important to achieve a lower bounce rate (for e-commerce sites), implying user engagement.

Below are some of the average bounce rates that are applicable to websites based on the industry:

Landing pages: 60%-90%

E-commerce: 20%-45%

Blogs and dictionaries: 65%-90%

B2B websites: 25%-55%

Let's look at some of the tried-and-proven techniques to fix bounce rates and drop-off rates, and drive engagement:

1. Work on the legibility and readability of your content

Imagine people coming to a website that lacks readability. People won’t stay long on such sites, where the content is neither readable nor legible. Including large chunks of text is never a great idea. In fact, it happens to drive people away rather than attract them.

Regardless of how great your content is, if your formatting is lousy, people will exit sooner than ever, and the bounce rate will shoot up.

Here are some interesting tips to improve the readability of your content and bring down the bounce rates:

• Include sub-heads wherever possible

• Include bullet points (it helps the reader to skim through the most important parts of the content)

• Include infographics (if possible), images, graphs, screenshots

• Include quotes or excerpts from industry leaders (wherever possible)

• Use bold or italics to add emphasis, wherever required

• Generate the readers’ curiosity by asking questions (this will improve the engagement rate)

• Include a summary section as well as a conclusion toward the end of your content (in case of blogs) and include a powerful CTA so that the user can take some action (this will improve the user engagement)

If you are using a WordPress theme, you can format content to improve user engagement.

2. Include the right keywords

An important part of your marketing campaign is keywords. For a highly optimized search, it is crucial to include the right kind of keywords that will drive high-value traffic.

A high-value keyword drives traffic, conversion, and plays a vital role in improving brand awareness. Experts, like Google, have been generating over 96% of their revenue from advertising, which is driven by targeting expensive keywords.

When you write content for your site or blog, make sure to target the right keywords (with high-value traffic) to bring down bounce rates. These keywords include both commercial and informational keywords. While informational keywords help create awareness, commercial keywords are aligned to specific products (directly responsible for driving sales).

Remember to not stuff too many keywords.

3. Include internal links

The next thing to do is to include internal links within your content that will help people to navigate through your site easily. With internal links, you can lead people to other content on your site (this is considered to be a powerful weapon just like call-to-actions).

Look for natural opportunities on your website within your own content to take your users to what they are looking for.

4. Keep updating your blogs

When you keep posting new blogs, you tend to forget those blogs that brought you the most traffic. This could lead to higher bounce rates on those old blogs. Update those blogs every now and then to yield the best ROI.

Not only does it help to reduce the bounce rates, but updating your blogs regularly will help to drive more traffic.

5. Work on the UX part

As we discussed in #1, formatting and readability tend to impact the bounce rates. The same applies when it comes to the UX of your site. A poor UX on your site could increase the bounce rates. Assess your page for UX factors that impact the bounce rates:

• Layout

• Animation

• Functionality

• Consistency

• Load speed

• Movement and so on

Also, take a look at the actions they take, such as clicking, swiping, scrolling, hovering, pinching, and others. Use heatmaps, click maps, or user testing to find weak spots. Work on these ideas:

• Where do they stop scrolling?

• Are users clicking?

• What do they click the most?

• Do they rage-click?

Once you spot the troubled areas, you can work on improving those.

Besides these, it is important to make your site mobile-friendly and avoid ads.

Conclusion

Bounce rates are good, but you can’t afford high bounce rates that drive away users. Not all of these tactics might work for your site. But you can keep experimenting on what works and what does not.

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