Every web site has them, there is virtually no eliminating them, but high bounce rates can be an indicator of either poor content quality or poor usability.
First, what is bounce rate? Well, the bounce rate is the amount of visitors that are single page visitors, or, the visitor leaves on the same page they enter. This means they find you, click through, look and then leave. What this tells you is that either your content on that page is not compelling enough to get the visitor to stick around, or, you are not offering a good navigation scheme or poor usability within your web site, encouraging the user to leave rather than try to figure out how to get around in your web site.
What is a high , low, or acceptable bounce rate? Well, that varies depending on who you are talking to. Generally it seems people tend to start putting bounce rate efforts on the back burner if it goes down to 50% or so. If it is higher than that, you need to do something.
The first thing to do is find out where your traffic is coming from. If you have visitors coming from keywords that are misleading, it's easy to predict the visitor came to the page and realized it was not what they were looking for and leave. Such is the nature of the internet. If you find your traffic is targeted pretty well, you need to then move on to ways to fix it.
To help remedy it, find out your highest traffic pages that have the highest bounce rates. Bounce rates are generally stated in analytics applications. Those pages need to be looked at and find out how to integrate more links to other areas of your web site. Perhaps it'll be a "related content" list of links, or, links within the content itself. Perhaps, depending on how your navigation is structured, you can highlight a certain part of your menu that is complementary, or similarly categorized in your web site.
There are many ways to set up such links...you could just add static links to other pages in your site that are loosely related to the existing page; meaning covering a similar topic or containing similar characters, products or situations. Or, you could automate it if your site is database driven (is any site not these days?) you could take, let's say a forum topic title, remove the stop words and comma delimit the rest of the word, and do a full text search against the rest of the forum topics and look for topics that are similar. Doing it this way will produce more I/O on your database, but will dynamically create a constantly evolving set of related links as well.
The trick is to get people to keep clicking from one page to the next, keep them interested and engaged. The lower your bounce rates, the higher your page views and the longer you get them to stay on your web site. The only real rule is to provide the most links you can in an attractive format, that are keeping people inside your site, rather than off to another.
I have a message forum that has a pretty high bounce rate and high traffic...what I implemented was this:
- On the front page of the forum, that has a list of recently active topics across all forums, I added links at the top of the page to all the forums individually, and links to each category of the the article library on the site.
- On the forum topic list pages for each individual forum I links at the top of the page to the categories of articles that are related to the forum topic, FAQ and glossary/terminology pages of the site.
- Just above the "reply form" field on individual topics I added a list of five related forum topics across the whole site based on a fulltext match/against query of the topics table.
I'll report back in a few days after I analyze the results of these actions.
