Representing the percentage of visitors who land on your website only to leave before checking out any other page, bounce rate is one of the few metrics you really don’t want to increase.
A high bounce rate often indicates that a page offers a poor user experience or is simply irrelevant to the guests that land on it. But that doesn’t mean you have to hit the delete button or start redesigning the page from scratch straight away.
Here are three steps to start pushing your bounce rate in the right direction.
1) Get Mobile Friendly, Pronto
The volume of mobile searches exceeded those made on desktop in 2017, making it crucial to offer an engaging website user experience for your guests across devices.
How frustrating is it to have to zoom-in multiple times to be able to read a web page’s content on your Smartphone? Or to land on a page that loads slowly? Did you know that longer videos require a significant amount of data and can negatively impact page load speed?
With so many other travel websites out there vying for their attention, guests are sure to bounce if yours offers a poor user experience. Evaluate your website’s mobile friendliness as a whole. It’s not enough to simply build a responsive site - visitor engagement with the site must be user friendly and interactive if you want to retain traffic.
2) Examine Bounce Rate In Relation To Traffic Source
The source directing traffic to your web page can offer some valuable clues about its bounce rate.
Delve into your website analytics. If you notice a particularly high bounce rate from traffic arriving from your property’s social media pages, take another look at your messaging on these platforms. Does the social content truly match what your web page is about? Does the web page; its images, headline and text deliver on the promises set out by your social posts? If the answer is no, you have a problem, but also a solution.
When you’re promoting your website’s pages on social, ensure your messaging ties in closely with the webpage content you’re directing guests to. Whatever the source platform, if you’re not meeting the expectations of your audience, you’re going to have a high bounce rate.
3) Eliminate Distractions That May Be Compromising User Experience
We've already covered how crucial it is to create a great mobile user experience for your guests – but that goes for other platforms, too. If your website includes things like full screen pop-ups, for instance, you risk not only irritating visitors but also facing a penalty from Google, who are as keen as ever to serve up only the best quality search results for users.
That doesn’t mean that some well crafted pop up messages aren’t useful, but if they’re likely to provide a significant disruption to user experience, you can bet your bounce rates will suffer. Remember, your chief aim is to drive guests to your website pages and keep them there long enough to convert. Anything that distracts from your messaging and takes your guests’ attention away from this goal is working against you.
Lowering bounce rates means taking in the full picture – where your traffic is coming from, how long guests spend browsing your content and what device they’re using to do so. Does your website’s messaging and user experience align with all these factors?
What is your hotel doing to improve your website’s bounce rate? Let us know in the comments below!
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