When you run a website or a blog, you will probably be interested to see the ways in which you can encourage more users, and to see the progress that you have been making in this area. One way of judging the progress of your blog’s content, and therefore the visitors that it might attract, is by studying its bounce rate. It might sound confusing, but it is in fact a very simple indicator of how well your blog is doing.
Firstly, it is important to know what a bounce rate is. The bounce rate is basically the amount or percentage of users who visit your blog but leave without looking at any of the other pages. Often, statistics software will show you how long visitors stay on your homepage, and whether they leave straight away (hence the term ‘bounce’) or continue to look at other pages of your site. For these reasons, the bounce rate can be a good indication of how attractive your homepage or your content is. However, it is also important to realise that a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean your blog is failing.
There are a few reasons why a high bounce rate can be natural in a blog. For a normal website, a high bounce rate would usually be a definite indication of some sort of failure. However, there are different reasons for a high bounce rate when blogging. When you have subscribers they will be notified about each blog post you make. This means they usually only visit that specific new post before leaving again, which can increase your bounce rate. In this case a high bounce rate does not mean you are failing, but there are still some things you can do to improve it.
1. Give regular readers a reason to engage with your content
If subscribers tend to quickly read your new posts and then leave again, contributing to your high bounce rate, you may want to encourage them to participate more, by leaving comments and engaging in discussion. You might do this by leaving your blog posts with discussion questions, or actively replying to all the comments you do receive to encourage them to come back again and comment more. You can also see the search terms users are finding your blog with, and write posts catered around popular terms that you don’t yet have content for.
2. Interactive features
The system of encouraging comments mentioned above promotes user interaction with your site. There are also other ways in which to do this. For example, polls are a very popular way to get users to interact with a blog. They are very simple and quick, which means they can appeal to even the most casual user who otherwise may have just quickly left your blog.
3. Link to relevant posts
If you find that your users are visiting and mainly staying on one particular post you can incorporate features into your blog that will automatically link to other relevant posts. For example, you may have one post about how to choose your perfect laptop but also a related one with reviews of specific brands. This second post may be exactly what your users are looking for, but they just won’t know it exists unless you link to it from the first post. By doing this you will be encouraging users to browse your site for longer, lowering your bounce rate.
4. Rethink your blog’s design
A key reason for a high bounce rate is the fact that a site may be poorly designed, and not catch the eye of users who visit it for the first time. For this reason you may want to experiment with layout and navigation options during the growing stages of your blog. Users are unlikely to stick around if they do not know how to visit certain areas of your site, so make it simple and self-explanatory. You should always make sure the design is eye-catching, as many users will judge your site in just a few seconds before leaving or choosing to stay.
These are a few ways in which you can lower your blog’s bounce rate. In most cases your blog or hosting provider will provide you with tools that enable you to keep track of the bounce rate of your pages. Once you start to improve the rate, you can also greatly increase the prospects of monetizing your blog and building up a solid readership.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am
nice article! all points you made are very true.
one tip though make your rss feed full text not just a summary .. because with partial feeds you loose a lot of subscribers
October 27th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for the tip Julius! I see benefits to both sides for the rss length. The summary feed gives incentive to the subscriber to click the link and create traffic in return for the article. I can also see the merits to having a full article in the feed for subscribers.
So much so that it really got me to thinking. There is one feed I subscribe to in particular that I get as a full article feed. You know what? Even with the full article there I always click the link as I prefer to read if from the blog itself and make a comment.
Anyway long story short is I am going to give the full feed a shot and have made the change. Hopefully I will see you as a subscriber.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:27 am
I like the bouncerate idea to measure attractiveness. I also like the steps you have outlined to increase the bouncerate.
However, where do I get these statistics from? Are there any sites that will tell me the number of hits and the time people stayed on my site?
October 30th, 2008 at 7:04 am
lvs - Most any traffic monitoring program would have this. I use a couple - one google analytics and the other is called traffic facts.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:41 am
oh i am already one of your subscribers but to say the truth it usually annoys me when people use partial feeds because if they do they really need to have an incredibly interesting article for me to take a look at. With full feeds I just look at the whole article maybe skim through and read it if i find it interesting