How to decrease bounce rate?

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Like 80-90% or so?

No matter what niche I've been in, I've seen 80-90%. Unless it's brick and mortar then it's 30-40%.

Even with addictive content, professional brand, beautiful theme, related posts, side bar posts, etc, etc.

I hate pagination, so that to me is like cheating, doesn't count when you're getting a users true intentions.

What are you guys doing to force peasants to keep clicking?
 
Never found a reason to care too much about bounce rate.

I'd much rather focus on Avg. Time on Page, conversion rate, and email opt-in rate.

If I keep you around for a while, I win.
If you buy something, I win.
If I get your email, I win.

If you bounce, so be it.
 
I've also typically had a high bounce rate like that on my authority sites. I think it totally depends on what kind of user you're serving. For organic traffic, we're all trained to search for what we want on Google, get what we want, and if we want more, we search Google again right in the address bar. No need to bother checking to see if the current site has what we want next. Just type it in the address bar and off to the next. That's just how it is for these types of sites.

However, for affiliate sites I want the highest bounce rate as possible, because it means they're possibly bouncing over and making a purchase. Same goes for CPC ads. I want those clicked and I want my bounce rate high.

For something like a forum you're going to have a much, much lower bounce rate, because the user is likely arriving at the forum direct instead of through Google and are there to engage in some other fashion than hit-and-run.

I think the best way to get a higher pages-per-visit is through plenty of internal linking and stuff like "related posts" at the end of content. I don't think there's any new ideas to execute in this realm. You either entice them to stay by shoving links to click in their face, or they go ahead and leave (and hopefully share your article or link to you).

But I agree, I don't care about bounce rates at all. I just want to make the most out of the user while I have them where they want to be. I can show them 5 ads and then 5 ads on a 2nd page, or I can just go ahead and show them 10 ads on the page they want to be on (or maybe way more). Same concept applies for all other sorts of monetization. They're the hottest they'll ever be on that one page. By page 2 your chance of getting the sale is likely diminishing if they're from Google's organic SERPs. I don't meant to imply funnels don't work, but Google is a part of the funnel in this example and your 1 page is the bottom of the funnel for that user. So convert them in some meaningful way while you have them or they're gone (email address capturing, display ads, whatever).
 
This is wild, but I was looking at how sites featured on DrudgeReport (reddit too) sneakily do this scenario:

1. Click through to read article

2. Click "back" button, but instead of going back to Drudge it goes to the home page.

3. You have to click back once more to get back to Drudge

Turns out the websites are sneakily adding to your history the homepage/target page with the historyApi. So if you want to do reduce the bounce rate like News sites are doing, update the historyApi.

See more: https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/ly4eap/injecting_a_before_you_go_page_into_the_history/
 
Super question - interested in other responses - do you value time on site, pageviews or bouncerate more or less relatively speaking?
 
Daboodah said:
Super question - interested in other responses - do you value time on site, pageviews or bouncerate more or less relatively speaking?
Click to expand...
Time on Site - Don't care. It's high for visitors that are interested and low for those who aren't or bots, etc. It's not something to directly try to manipulate. The way to deal with it is to find better traffic sources/keywords and better match your content to those sources/keywords. These are things you should be doing by default, so time on site is an after thought.

Pageviews - I like to look at pageviews/sessions because they're kind of top of the funnel. They're showing me my reach, and if I can benchmark it for any time period for any traffic source (like past 30 days vs. previous 30 days, all sources and organic) I can quickly gauge if I'm growing my reach and exposure or not. This metric comes before all others, so it does matter. Without it, the others don't exist. But you don't just want any old pageview, of course.

Bounce Rate - Same as time on site. It's an after thought I don't care about. Some pages I want people to bounce (to an affiliate site to make me money). Some sites I'd rather them not bounce and increase the pages per session metric. But I never look at it. If I'm doing other things right, I'll optimize this metric. And ultimately I've not had a good enough reason to look at it. And in cases where I would care, I'd measure other things like user journeys and conversions. A low bounce rate means nothing if it's not producing revenue.
 
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