A high bounce rate might be considered a good thing if you’re talking about trampolines.  When websites are concerned, not so much.  So a Google Analytics specialist has outlined ways in which site and blog owners can reduce bounce rates and get their visitors to stick around.

A “bounce” is, in case you don’t know, when someone visits a site and then leaves without making a single click.  This doesn’t represent much of a compliment.  A bounce rate, expressed as a percentage, just tells how many people out of 100 are bailing.  And on the Official Google Blog, Avinash Kaushik suggested finding out which sites send you the bounciest individuals.

You can use Google Analytics to do this.  Once you’ve got a list of URLs, then go see if you can find out why their links to your site aren’t doing you any good.  Maybe there’s just not a subject matter connection; the people behind Love Naturally (a romantic comedy in preproduction) shouldn’t really expect to see tons of movie aficionados streaming over from here, for example.

Or maybe there’s something you can actually correct.  Suppose a business sharing your building keeps linking to you, but few of its real-world customers can find your address and discover that you’re close.

Kaushik recommended addressing this second issue by going to the “Content” section of Google Analytics and clicking on the “Top Landing Pages” report.  This will let you uncover precisely which pages on your site are losing the most visitors.  Hopefully you can then go on to determine what the pages are missing (or have too much of) and fix the problem.

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