As I said in my article yesterday, being able to analyze statistical data is a big part of running a successful blog. The sad part is, that it’s one of the most overlooked parts of blogging. If only blogger knew how much this would help their day-to-day efforts to become an authority blog, they might pay more attention to it. Today we’re going to talk about analyzing your bounce rate statistics, and how to improve them!

Bounce Rate & What It Means To You

Bounce rate is the percentage of users that view nothing more than the page that they land on whether it be your homepage, or an internal page. It doesn’t matter how they got here, whether it be by a link from another blog, or a quick click of the “stumble” button, it all counts. I’ve searched all over to find an answer to what an acceptable bounce rate is and I haven’t found anything conclusive. Since there isn’t anything to confirm the thoughts of myself, and some other bloggers, the popular answer seems to be that anything below about 40% is for a blog is pretty good. Anything higher and you may want to think about changing things. One Man’s Goal sits at a slightly higher-ish 42%.

Although 40% seems to be a nice round number to use, it’s definitely not the definitive answer to the question. The definitive answer to the bounce rate question is that there is no definitive answer. Bounce rate will vary greatly from blog to blog, and it varies even more based on where your traffic comes from.

For example, if you get a lot of your traffic from stumbleupon (like I do), then your bounce rate will always be a bit high. Stumblers are finicky creatures and if you don’t catch their attention right away, they’ll be on to the next site. Thus, you’ll generally have a bit higher of a bounce rate if you rely on great deals of social bookmarking traffic, like stumbleupon.

Another example of a traffic source that produces a high bounce rate is the “referral” from another blogger. Generally when other blogs link to you, they link to one article, and then write a short description of why they are linking to it. This is great, as it may snag you a few new readers… but the bounce rate is generally pretty high here too. The reason? Well, you went to “Blog X” to read blog x, not blog y… so you may be interested to see what they linked to, but most of the time you are going to take a quick glance, maybe skim the article in question, and then go back to blog x to finish whatever it is that you were reading. Maybe the content got your attention on blog y and you’ll bookmark it or subscribe to the rss feed, but most likely, you will read it and then be done. Thus, the bounce rate for blog y will go up because you only viewed the page you landed on.

These are just a couple of examples of how your bounce rate could be high. Would I trade either of these traffic sources to lower my bounce rate? Of course not. However, there are some ways to improve your bounce rate without skipping over valuable traffic sources. Here are a few examples.

1. Change your theme. I’m sad to say it, but most of the time if a persons theme isn’t visually appealing, I won’t take the time to view their content. Take Seth Godin for example. He’s one of the biggest bloggers in the community, but the fact that his blog looks like crap - just sends me packing immediately. It’s a bit vain, I know… but bloggers should work harder on making their blog look good.
2. Write better headlines. Copywriting is a big part of blogging, and a good headline is a good seguay into the rest of your post. I would much rather read - “Bloggers Heads Explode When Faced With Too Much Information” - than - “Information Overload”. It’s a fact of life… we are drawn to something that makes us curious.
3. Use images. I hate seeing big blocks of text that aren’t being split up by some sort of list, colors, or images. You have to create some visual excitement for your readers. Making a short bulleted list can do wonders, so can using different size texts (in paragraph headings), and adding simple images to your post. It all goes back to visual appeal.
4. Quit writing crappy content. Content is king, and that may hold true 90% of the time, but when it comes to bounce rate, it usually has more to do with your ability to create visual appeal, and your ability to write a headline that can create some curiosity.
5. Lead in to your post. The first few sentences need to be a quick description of whatever topic you are writing about. Bloggers are scanners, and we don’t want to read something that we already know about, or something that doesn’t seem appealing to us. Give them a quick summary.

Give this stuff a try. I guarantee that it lowers your bounce rate at least a few points. My first few months of blogging I had a pretty staggering bounce rate number of 64%. Since then I’ve been able to lower it considerably just by using these methods. Let me know if you have anything you’d like to add!

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