October 11th, 2024
I've recently noticed my website has a high bounce rate at 65.9% (the average is 26-70% depending on the industry). How can I fix this?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
I used this article to help me build a report using Google Analytic 4's Explore feature. I wanted this report to tell me how many visitors bounced from which page and how long they were on that page for. When creating the report, I used Page path and screen class for the dimensions, and Entrance, Exits, Bounce Rate, and Average session duration for the metrics.
This report showed me that during September 2024 my homepage had a bounce rate of 60% (I would ideally like to see this closer to 40% or lower). I can also see that the average session duration is 11 seconds... But how long is 11 seconds? It's long enough for me to read the Above-the-Fold section, scroll to the footer, and back. Not very long... So this tells me they losing interest as they scroll. I could change the layout... Maybe add a results section second? Might increase average duration... Change the tone of the copy? Only helpful if they stay long enough to read it. Add something interactive? Perhaps... a quiz? There was that one site that had a mini game in one section, who was that? I don't have anything interactive at the moment, so let's try adding the Results section second...
Since I'm adding the Results section, I should also take note of the current Path Exploration chart. By linking the Projects page to the Results section, there's a high probability that pages traffic will increase. (Since that page was launched in October, it doesn't have a ranking.
Before:
August 29th, 2024 - October 10th, 2024
Benchmarks:
Total Bounce Rate: 58.8%
Homepage Bounce Rate: 57.1%
Average Session Duration: 30s
After:
October 10th, 2024 - November 22nd, 2024
Benchmarks:
Total Bounce Rate: 63.27%
Homepage Bounce Rate: 56%
Average Session Duration: 2m35s
In about 6 weeks I will update this report with new the results, my takeaways, and next steps... Until then, toodles!
November 26th, 2024
Ok, the results are in and I am not thrilled with the results. The total bounce rate went up but the homepage bounce rate and session duration improved which was actually the goal, just not by as much as I was hoping... However I have learned a few new things that I hope to be implementing around the site soon.
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