Are People Puking All Over Your Site?

: Image via CrunchBase

If so, you need to help them feel better.

Your bounce rate tells you how many people came to your site, looked around for a sec, puked, and left without clicking on anything (NOTE: this is NOT good).

Google has offered up some tips on how to use Analytics to improve your bounce rate.

Tip #1: Find out where your visitors are coming from and which of these sites sends visitors with the highest bounce rate. To do so, all you have to do is go to “Traffic Sources” (in Google Analytics, or whatever tool you are using), click on “Referring Sites,” and boom!

In about fifteen seconds you know which sites are your best friends and where you need to look a little deeper. By identifying the sites that are sending you visitors with high bounce rates, you can investigate the reasons why (the campaigns, the context in which your link is placed, the ads) and make changes to ensure that visitors find what they are looking for when they come to your site.

Tip #2: Check your content. Go to “Content” (labeled as such in Google Analytics) and click on “Top Landing Pages” report.

You can see different pages of your website on the left and the corresponding bounce rates on the right. Remember, you don’t decide the homepage of your website. When people search, the engine finds the most relevant page on your site and that’s the homepage. If you have 50,000 pages on your website, you have 50,000 homepages. The report above is showing the top ten pages of your website and which ones might be letting you down by not engaging your visitors enough to get even one click!

In under an hour you can discover which sources are your BFFs and which pages on your site need some sprucing up. This will ensure lower bounce rates, higher engagement with your site, and perhaps even higher revenue.