The Bounce Rate shows us the portion of users who visited a single page and 'abandoned' it. Throughout this article, we will see that a high Bounce Rate can be extremely valuable for the site.
Assuming you are using Google Analytics, in the Behavior section and Overview, we can see the percentage of the Bounce Rate of the site.
Basically, what this number shows is the rate of people who did not perform any action after entering the site. In other words, if you visit this article for 30 minutes and close the site, it will count as one more point for the Bounce Rate. Google is guided by scripts and codes; knowing the real intention of those consuming the content and understanding whether it is indeed relevant to them are factors to be analyzed more deeply. Before we talk about the solution for your Bounce Rate, let's analyze this metric more closely. The rate leads us to think that these numbers show the level of user engagement and the consumption of the content presented to them on the landing page; however, what happens in practice is quite different. The user:- Arrives at your page;
- Likes your product;
- Looks at the phone number;
- Calls and closes the page;
You have a new potential customer, a new sale; however, the GA (Google Analytics) script has no idea of the relevance of the page to the user and even less of the user to the page. But as mentioned earlier, Google follows scripts, and what do our lines of code say? 'If the user does not interact with other pages and closes this one, we count it as a bounce.' And there goes the Bounce Rate being increased improperly.
Another fact we can analyze is the following:
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You send an Email Marketing;
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The user clicks and lands on your page;
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Likes the product and wants to make a purchase;
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At the time of purchase, the user is taken out of the site to complete the payment (with PayPal or PagSeguro, for example). In this case, we have a relevant, satisfied, and happy user, but BINGO! The Bounce Rate goes up again.
The Solution to Reduce Bounce Rate: Adjusted Tracking
There are countless ways to optimize our GA Script to obtain different numbers and data on the dashboard, including more robust ones than the example below (I will present in new articles on the subject), but since the intention of this content is to show in a simple and quick way how to improve the numbers, this metric serves perfectly!
Google gives us the freedom to add different functions to change the action of our GA Script according to our needs and data collection objectives. As presented by the Google Analytics Blog, you can insert an 'x' time to define whether the user is engaged with the presented landing page or not. Thus, validations of future clicks and navigations within the site are discarded, and the minimum time the user must stay on the page to not be considered a 'Bounce' becomes valid.
In the code, only a few changes need to be made; just one line insertion is necessary:
Where UA-XXXXXXXX-1 is your Tracking ID, and in the bold line, you should change the value in seconds that you consider to be a valid time for an engaged user, for example, changing it to 15 seconds:
setTimeout(“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ’15_seconds’, ‘read’])”,15000);
If you are using the standard version of GA, your Bounce Rate consists only of users who did not proceed on your page; this is just a metric and does not mean good or bad news. The next time you analyze the Bounce Rate, think about your goal with this number and your form of interaction between the user, the site, and the script's objective.
Want to discuss Bounce Rate a bit? Let us know what you think about this metric and how you implement the code in your business!