How to reduce refusals. Bounce rate - behavioral factors. What exactly will be considered a refusal?

By reducing the bounce rate to 6-9% percent according to Yandex metrics, the site rises to the TOP 5 for 80-90% of requests and traffic increases by 2-3 times.

Below are step-by-step instructions on how to detect keywords that generate high bounce rates and fix them

Why does the site have a high bounce rate?

A visit of less than 15 seconds is considered a refusal, but in fact, if the average visit to a site is less than 1.5 minutes (except for quick topics: ordering a taxi, renting a manipulator, etc.), then consider that the failures on the site are high and the site is bad.

Why does this happen?

• Uninteresting page content
  People came to read but the information was not interesting to them
• Not targeted visitors
  you lured a visitor from a search engine, but he did not find the answer to his request on the site
• Incorrect placement of information
  you tried to write an article, but the text is small, without pictures - they won’t read it, they will go to another site where your text is beautifully designed, in the end they will read it there and the competitor’s site will not be rejected and will take an even higher position in the search results

sources of failures

First of all, you need to look at traffic sources and analyze them for bounce rates.
Since, for example, the behavior of visitors from Yandex and Google can be very different.
The topic is "computer repair". From Yandex, visitors give 20% refusals, and from Google, 9% refusals, this suggests that Google has a more targeted audience and the emphasis should be placed on this search engine (but there are not many such niches and 80% of the RuNet are searched through Yandex)
You can view and identify the source in Yandex Metrics like this:

• all reports - sources - sources summary

Instructions on how to reduce bounces on a website

Below I write my personal experience of how we reduce refusals. This gives the result 100%

What tools will we use?

We will carry out all actions through Yandex Metrica (via its new BETA interface) - https://beta.metrika.yandex.ru/

Identifying pages with high bounce rates

Select the domain we need and go to the menu (top right), then select:

• all reports - contents - login pages

select a time period - quarter (no longer necessary since the data on keywords will be distorted)

select display of pages "linear list"

selecting pages with high bounce rates

We calculate words that give high refusals

We configure the display of keywords that came to the page

We display a display of our page with which we are working - we enter part of the address of our page into the search (the whole one is possible) and find keywords with high failure rates (above 10-15%)

These keywords need to be worked on.

Option 2:

• remove them from the page
  visitors come, but not finding an answer close the page
• add information about them to the page
  if these words fit the theme of the page, then it is better to add 1-2 paragraphs and add pictures so that the visitor receives an answer to his request

What is the best way to proceed must be looked at in each specific case, the work ratio is 50/50, there can be no exact advice

Working with a snippet (site view in search results)

Often visitors can go to pages using keywords that are not in the text of this page, but these same keywords are in the Title (title) and a lot depends on how correctly it is composed.

• Target Audience
  how long will target visitors go to the page
• Website click-through rate in search results
  The more enticing and accurate the headline, the more people will click on it.

Example.
For the request “website creation”, the one above has a more attractive snippet, it indicates the price, terms, and this is the main thing that interests people.

What are failures in Yandex metrics and how to reduce this indicator

Great article 1

What are failures in Yandex Metrica? How to reduce the bounce rate on a website? Detailed analysis of statistics of visitors to your resource. We learn to improve behavior and bring the site to the top of search engines.

Hello friends!
In this article we will work with metrics.
At the initial stage, this blog had a percentage of failures according to Yandex metrics in the region of 25 and this is simply terrible! In a few weeks I managed to reduce it to 15-18.
At the moment it averages 11, which I no longer consider ice.
Next, I will show what a refusal is - it is not 15 seconds, as is commonly believed. I will tell you how I brought down this indicator.
I’ll tell you how an article gets to the top, how long it takes, and why one is in first place and the other is in 11th.

What are failures in Yandex metrics - 5 or 30 seconds?

In general, friends, a refusal is considered to be a page view of less than 15 seconds in Yandex, 30 in Google, or less than 2 pages viewed on a resource, that is, even if less than 15 seconds. looked, but the guest looked at 2 pages - this is not a refusal.
In fact, things are not quite like that.
Firstly, not 15, but 14.

Where:
1 is visits, that is, 1 is the person’s first time with me.
The next odnushka is how many people have visited this issue (I look at the star status for 1 day, you can look at it for a week, a month, and so on).
0% is refusals; if it is 1 person, it will be 0% or 100. Accordingly, for example, 5 people came in, of which 1 cancellation will show 20%.
The next number one is the depth of views, the reader viewed the 1st page.
14 is the viewing time, it = 14 seconds.

Of course, you can argue here, I’ll explain why later, but in my statistics 14 is always good).

Even less than 14 is not always bad.
Example.

As you can see, 11 seconds, the visit is counted.
Why is this so, you tell me?
There are 2 options here.
First. The reader received an answer to his question.
Second. Luck factor).

See what the first case is like.
There is a category where the visitor does not need your thoughts, he just needs an answer.
For example, I want to know what time it is in the USA.
I enter a question, go to it, the time is shown at the top.
I don’t want to know anything about this country, well, I’m not interested, I don’t like Americans) I just want to know the time and that’s all. Accordingly, I looked for, say, 5 seconds, found the answer, closed the site and I don’t bother with Yandex anymore.
Accordingly, the Yandex search engine or Google believes that this page provides the answer to the question posed.
This means it has a place in the top 10, and there can be no talk of any cancellations.
I have such a plan, it quietly, peacefully stands in the top ten of Google, Yandex has just begun to rank it.
Despite the fact that readers spend less than 15 seconds on this page, on average.

What is option 2?
The user types in what he wants to find out in the search engine, scrolls through everything in a row, your article, say, in 15th place in the search, reaches it, enters for 10 seconds, closes your portal and does not access the search again.
And this is already a signal for search engines that the entry provides an answer, and it will also increase in search results!
After 10 seconds of visiting then).

There is also a 3rd interesting option, you can’t ignore it).
As Yandex representatives stated at the webmaster school, a publication can be in the top without knowing the behavioral implications of it.
What does it mean?
There is not a single visitor to this article, but it is the first.
How can this be?
This option is possible if a person sees the answer to his question in the snippet or title of the article.
Example.


For this request, the site is in 1st place.
I think you've figured it out a little).
Next, I’ll tell you how I reduced the bounce rate.

How to reduce the bounce rate on a website - my methods

At the beginning, if you remember, I told you that I had just a gigantic number of dissatisfied people) according to Yandex metrics.
How did I kill this disease?
First of all, I went to the metrics, analyzed which pages the disease occurred on (this is possible in Google, but unlikely in Yandex).
Next, I went to YouTube and selected a thematic video for these articles, and put them on them accordingly.
After this, the % decreased significantly.
By the way, it is not necessary to put a thematic video; some people simply insert interesting videos from you tube into articles.
Next, I put links to thematic texts from my blog, altering the texts a little accordingly.
After these actions, it decreased from 22-25% to an average of 15, which is also quite a lot.
Next I will tell you what % should be for successful promotion.

The percentage of failures on a website is the norm - what is it?

Once again, I consider trust to be the main ranking factor.
It’s him, not Titz, Page Rank, or anything else.
For those who do not understand what we are talking about, you can read the article about trust
I will continue the conversation with those who know what we are talking about).
Their percentage for the last month is here.

The trust of this blog in Yandex.

Trust 4 gives 10-11%.
There are, of course, many other factors here. For example, the quality of articles, age.
This blog is still quite young, it is not even a year old.
I think the maximum for him is 5.
Personally, I haven’t seen more than 5 resources that haven’t been available for a year.
This blog jumps from 4 to 5, I’ll explain why later.
A score of 7 or higher is considered good.

Look, the fewer refusals, the higher the trust.
The higher it is, the more often Yandex shows articles in searches.

Percentage by metric.
Over 20% is bad.
The norm is 15%.
Good 10%.
Excellent 5-6%

How an article written for low-frequency queries brings in 1000 visitors a day

Let's first tell you what percentage of failures a request in the top 10 should have.
Up to 5% - top 3
Up to 10% - in the 10th.
Over 10% - for 10 and anywhere).

Why is the trust jumping on this resource?
Look, he gets an A.
What's happening?
What is a trust anyway?
This is trust, that is, the higher it is, the more often entries are shown to visitors in searches.
Let's continue).
Yandex says - this is a good site, I will show it more often).
But guys, all the articles can’t be great, so the traffic increases, but the rejections increase.
As a result, trust declines.
5, was here when the norms were within 5-6%.

How can 1 article bring a thousand readers a day?
If she suddenly got into the top 3 and is there today, this does not mean at all that she will even be in the top 10 tomorrow).
Yandex will analyze behavior on it for several months, that is, less than 13 seconds. and the time spent on it by visitors.
If search robots see good behavior on it (up to 5 percent are dissatisfied), it will be in the top three.
The longer it stands there, the more different requests stick to it).
If it stays at the top for six months, search engines will decide that this is a cool page.
They will rank it not only for these queries, but also for mid-frequency, and possibly high-frequency ones.

That's actually all I wanted to tell you today.
Questions and comments are welcome.
Bye everyone!

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing no more than one page. There are many reasons why they might do this, but in general, a high bounce rate on a website is a bad sign for the website owner.

It seems like - well, a metric is like a metric, in analytics there are generally a lot of all sorts of numbers. But, there is a problem. A high bounce rate indicates that all your efforts to attract traffic are being negated by users simply leaving your site pages without generating any conversions.

Imagine that you have an offline store. But potential clients just pass by. Or, even worse, they walk through the door, glance around the room and immediately leave. This is exactly what happens on your site every time analytics registers a “bounce.”

The good news is that everything can be fixed. Here are some of the most common causes of this problem, and how to fix them.

Slow loading of website pages

Nowadays, the speed of a website directly affects whether the user will stay on it or not. Only a small part of visitors are willing to wait more than 3-4 seconds, and the majority will simply close the tab after this time.

This is especially important for mobile phones. It’s not for nothing that Google, in its site speed testing service, displays data for desktops and mobiles separately. Moreover, it is the mobile tab that is displayed by default.

Google has long stated that site speed is a component of their ranking algorithm. So improving this indicator is necessary at least in the context of SEO work. But more importantly, it impacts the user experience. And the failure rate as well.

How to fix:

• check the speed of your site using one of the following services – Page Speed ​​Insights, Pingdom Tools or GTmetrix;
• use the list of tips that these services give after checking or pass them on to your developer;
• optimize images by reducing their volume using a graphics editor;
• monitor the load when installing various kinds of scripts, plugins or modules, they often negatively affect the speed of the site;
• use hosting that runs on SSD drives rather than legacy HDDs.

The title does not match the content

You can create an almost perfect title that includes all the necessary keywords and appeals to users. But people will still continue to leave the site. The crux of the problem is that they don’t find what they need in the article. The title and snippet simply do not match the content.

Often this may be due to the low qualifications of the author who wrote the material. A “remarkable” quality of many copywriters is their willingness to write on any topic without understanding it at all. As a result, you get water that is completely uninteresting to users.

How to fix:

• analyze the page content and edit the title and meta tags accordingly;
• rewrite the content so that it actually answers the search queries included in it.

Technical errors

They are on any website, even one that at first glance seems absolutely perfect. It’s just that some of them may be minor, while others may seriously affect the performance of the site and user experience. The slow page loading speed already mentioned at the beginning of the article can also be caused by technical errors.

For example, problems with functionality can lead to people being unable to complete a transaction, interacting with the site correctly (forms and buttons do not work), seeing a 404 page when trying to follow a link, etc. To find and fix problems, the most reasonable solution would be to involve specialists.

How to fix:

• The first thing you should do is look at the reports in the webmaster panels: the “Crawling Errors” section in Google Search Console and the “Diagnostics” section in Yandex.Webmaster;
• order a full technical audit or conduct it yourself if you have the appropriate skills;
• draw up a plan to correct errors and implement it.

If you are more or less versed in the technical part, but are not an SEO specialist, you can use special checklists, for example, from this site or on the Rovertask blog.

Low quality content

Everyone is talking about content now. But speaking does not mean knowing how to do. Visitors may leave your site simply because your content is downright bad. And if readability problems are added to this, then a high bounce rate becomes an expected pattern.

Many people prefer to order articles from exchanges instead of looking for smart authors on the side and wasting their time on it. As a result, the text for an automobile portal, a medical clinic website and an equipment repair shop is written by the same jack of all trades.

In commercial niches, you may need to hire a content marketer who can develop a truly effective strategy for you. Sometimes just finding a good author is not enough.

How to fix:

• start with the basics: check your grammar and correct grammatical errors. To do this, it is not necessary to hire an editor; you can use the same “Spelling”;
• format text on a page to improve readability. Use highlights, subheadings, paragraphs, lists and other similar elements for this purpose;
• attract authors who are well versed in the topic they are writing about. Ideally, if they are professionals in their field;
• remember the basic principles of quality content - the article should answer the reader’s questions, be informative, and cover the topic;
• improve the text on those pages where its quality leaves much to be desired.

Write texts in human language, avoiding complex terms and overly long sentences. Dilute them with images, remember that people “scan” the page with their eyes, looking for something to grab onto.

Poor usability

You can make your website beautiful, informative and functional. But this is not the main thing. The most important condition for success is that it should be convenient to use. Otherwise, why should the user go to another page, if even the one on which he is located only leaves the desire to leave quickly.

That's something, and the task of spoiling the visitor's impression of the site, many of their owners cope with a bang. Pop-up windows, auto-playing content, banners, small fonts and a design that generally resembles the triumph of surrealism are just a small part of the gentleman's set.

Fixing usability issues is at the core of everything. Without this, it is almost impossible to significantly improve your bounce rate and conversion rate.

How to fix:

• make sure that people can easily find what they are looking for - test the ease of navigation, search, check the site for broken links;
• use pop-ups only when really necessary and show them to a specific visitor no more than once;
• the text should be easy to read on mobile and desktop, graphics should not distract from information consumption;
• test whether it is convenient to interact with the site on different devices (laptop, tablet, phone);
• order website testing by real people, for example, through the AskUsers.ru service

Outdated design

In addition to the fact that the site must be well designed (usability), it must also be visually attractive. Good design may be subjective, but it is still important.

You can’t argue that a person will obviously have a greater desire to go into a stylish boutique than into a barn cluttered with old things. Even if both there and there sell the same thing.

How to fix:

• an easy way: buy a beautiful template for the CMS on which the site runs;
• A more complicated option: order the development of an individual design from professionals.

Untargeted traffic

Oddly enough, for some reason this is the last thing people think about. It may well happen that you need to revise the semantic core. The challenge is to choose words that will more selectively target your target audience. Transitions from less interested audiences often have a negative impact on the bounce rate.

If you are promoting a page for the request “custom designer kitchens”, and at the same time offering typical models from the catalog, it is not surprising that the visitor will leave as soon as he understands what’s what. This is a fairly simple example, but it explains the essence of the problem.

How to fix:

• For each of the popular entry pages, analyze the queries that lead to them from the search, then weed out the irrelevant ones;
• work first on those pages that have a high bounce rate.

Non-adaptive layout

Go to the “Audience” report in Google Analytics, select “Mobile Devices” here, and then select the “Overview” sub-item. If you see something like this there:

And at the same time, your website design is still not adapted for use on mobile devices - this is a problem. It is not surprising that in this case people leave the site, because it is simply inconvenient to use. A visual comparison in the illustration below:

How to fix:

• you can buy a ready-made design on Themeforest, which already has an adaptive version;
• If you don’t want to change the existing one, you can order the adaptation of its layout for mobile devices.

CTAs don't work

The main task of CTA elements is clear from the very definition of this abbreviation – Call to Action. That is, it is necessary to induce the user to take a certain action on the site. Thus, he not only remains on the site, but also views other pages on it, which reduces bounces. If CTA elements are ineffective, then we won’t be able to achieve our goal.

How to fix:

• analyze headings and text on buttons, forms and other elements. They may lack specificity, personalization, and a clear indication of what the user needs to do.

No trust in the site

This is important for commercial projects, because people want to deal with reliable companies in whose integrity you are confident. Therefore, do not be lazy to create a detailed “About Us” page, indicate here contact information, reviews of existing customers, add guarantees/benefits to product cards if you have a store.

In addition to this, it would be useful to switch the site to the HTTPS protocol. This green padlock is still positively perceived by visitors, and it’s also a good foundation for SEO for the future. I discussed all the nuances of this topic in more detail in this blog post.

Study and draw conclusions

Each specific site has its own problems and there are no universal recipes for detecting and eliminating them. In this article, I have given exactly the most common reasons, which, in my experience, occur most often.

In any case, before making any changes to the content, design or functionality of the site, take the time to study the data collected by the analytics. Here you can find answers to many questions. Even small changes can have a huge impact on your bounce rate, allowing you to get much more out of your site.

Increasing conversions is often directly related to bounce rates. If your site visitors click on a link in an ad, social media, or anywhere else, they go to the site, but immediately click on “close” - something is clearly going wrong with you. Pam Neely's article will help you figure out what's going on, and from it you can learn some useful tips on how to reduce the number of bounces - leaving the site without taking, let alone a targeted action, any action at all! The material is written in the first person.

It seems that the bounce rate is a fairly simple and obvious metric (read about why it is so important to count metrics for any project and how this can affect profits, but if you dig deeper, you can easily get confused. Even the definition itself raises questions. The Google Analytics Help Center defines bounce rate as “the percentage of one-page sessions (that is, visits in which a person leaves the site immediately after entering it without interacting with the page).” Sounds simple enough until you realize that your Google Analytics reports don't reflect this definition. Bounce rate calculations do not track page scrolling, which is one of the key ways a user interacts with a page. After all, someone might be interested in your blog post, read it in its entirety, and then return back to the search results. Such a visitor will be equated to “refuseniks.”

There are many other examples of how inaccurate a metric bounce rate is, but I'll spare you the SEO wisdom. The only thing you need to remember is that bounce rate is a relative parameter. All you need to care about is that your bounce rate is lower than your competitors.

How to Calculate Bounce Rate for Your Website

You can see the bounce rate for your entire site in your Google Analytics account dashboard. Google will give you information about the number of bounces on each page at any time. You can also go to the navigation section, look for behavior > site content > all pages, and you will see something like this (without the arrows, of course):

Here's how to find bounce rate information on your most visited pages. The left arrow shows where to find it in the navigation section. The right arrow points to the bounce rate column in the report.

Average bounce rate for different types of sites and devices

Before you panic about what you're seeing in your Google Analytics account, take a look at this:

As you can see, depending on the type of site, bounce rates can vary widely. Above was part of QuickSprout's How to Reduce Bounce Rate infographic, and according to them, this can range from 10% to 90%, depending on the type and purpose of the website.

If that's not enough for you to feel more confident, check out this graph, which shows the dependence of the bounce rate on the type of device the site visitor is using:

Remember, bounce rate is a relative parameter. All you really need to care about is making sure your bounce rate is lower than your competitors. To make sure of this, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the most common reasons for a high failure rate and how to eliminate them:

1. Your website consists of only one page

Of course, users are unlikely to move to the next page of the site...if it simply does not exist. As a rule, this leads to a high bounce rate on landing pages. According to QuickSprout's infographic, the average bounce rate for landing pages is 70-90%.

But still, is it possible to reduce it? We'll look at a few ways in detail below, but first, make sure your landing page is mobile responsive, has good layout, loads quickly, and has a clear call to action. If your bounce rate is still over 90%, consider filtering the traffic on that page, or consider tweaking your site to better accommodate that traffic flow.

2. GoogleAnalyticsconfigured incorrectly

This happens more often than you think. If your bounce rate is too high (over 90%) or too low (less than 10%), make sure you've configured Google Analytics correctly and there's nothing wrong with it. An indicator that something is going wrong can be sharp jumps in indicators over a short period of time (1-2 days).

If Google Analytics is not configured correctly, something like this might happen:

Not setting up Google Analytics correctly is one of the most common reasons why your bounce rate is too high (90% or more) or too low (10% or less).

3. Your site loads too slowly

Most Internet users are unlikely to tolerate a slow website. This is especially true for those who use mobile devices. Slow websites kill any user interest and increase the bounce rate.

This infographic excerpt from Red Website Design demonstrates this clearly:

Page load time has a major impact on your bounce rate.

4. Confusing page navigation

Many sites are guilty of this. Use generally accepted web design standards to make navigation simple and easy to use (everything should be intuitive). Creativity is great, but not if it conflicts with website visitors' expectations of the page's functionality. Here are some basic examples of website design improvements that will help improve navigation: a logo that includes a link to your home page, and a full-width footer with links to the main sections of your site.

Of course, navigation greatly influences the bounce rate, because it measures whether users went to another page or not, and navigation, in turn, shows exactly where to click.

5. You don't have a mobile responsive version

As was the case earlier this year, a good half of the traffic on the entire Internet comes from mobile devices. If your page is awkward or impossible to view on most mobile devices, rest assured your bounce rate will be high.

When SEOs start working on a website to reduce bounce rates, the first thing they usually do is improve the design so that the page looks good on a mobile screen. Typically, a responsive design is created in which the overall layout of the site is automatically adjusted for different devices.

Even if your bounce rate is good, but your site does not have a responsive design, address this first.

Pages that are not easy to view on mobile can significantly increase your bounce rate.

6. You don't have a clear call to action.

At first glance, this only applies to landing pages, but in fact, it applies to your home page, blog posts, and any other page on your site. Every page should have a clear call to action, whether it's signing up for an email newsletter, reading a blog article, or filling out a form on a landing page.

About 80% of all your website traffic comes directly to the internal pages of your website, not the home page. The home page typically receives between 20% and 40% of incoming traffic. So, in addition to having a clear call to action on your home page, try to work on it on others as well, and treat each page of your site as a landing page. (You can read about why it’s worth working on the landing page design and how to make it effective in the article: “”).

7. Pop-ups on your site may be annoying to your visitors.

Pop-ups are great (especially if they help you grow your customer base), but if you have a very high bounce rate, try disabling them for a while and see if that helps reduce your bounce rate. If your bounce rate has decreased after you removed pop-ups, there are two possible reasons for this:

• Whatever you offer through pop-ups is of no interest to your customers.
• Some of your target audience hates pop-ups.

Even if some of your customers hate them, there is a simple solution. Show pop-ups only to users who stay on your site. Showing this widget as soon as a person enters the page is not the best solution; you will collect more contacts with it if you show it a little later.

It's important to experiment with your popup display settings to figure out how to make it most effective.

An example of possible pop-up window settings.

Settings for widgets on the site

8. Too many ads

Getting rid of a third of the ads is unlikely to have a major impact on your site's profitability - analyze the cost and quality of each ad. When you start getting rid of ads, remove the worst examples first. Statistics show that your profit will fall by somewhere between 10-15%. But over time, you'll start making a lot more money because users will stay on your site longer and be much more likely to come back.

9. Write for those who read “diagonally”

As a writer, it's hard for me to admit this, but people on the Internet read quite a bit. As a rule, they “scan” the text and read it diagonally. If they come across a page with long paragraphs, many will simply leave the site because it is difficult to understand and they find it difficult to read.

If this problem is also affecting you, there is an easy way to fix it. Just follow these tips to make your text more easily scannable:

• Paragraphs are no longer than five lines.
• 3-5 sentences per paragraph.
• Use bulleted lists whenever possible (if you are listing two or more items).
• Use subheadings.
• Don't forget about the pictures.
• Don't use fancy, long words where you can use simple, short ones.
• Break long sentences into several shorter ones.

10. The page must be able to handle the traffic load

It's a shame that Google removed the top keyword reports earlier this year. Currently, in our Google Analytics accounts, we only see the depressing phrase “keyword not provided.” Since April of this year, even AdWords accounts no longer show popular keywords. However, we can still use "search query" data in Google Webmaster Tools.

Despite all the shortcomings of Google Webmaster Tools, the Search Query Report is one of the best ways to find out what users expect to see on your page. Check your search queries on pages that have bounce problems - it may be that what users want to see is not what is written on the page.

If you've optimized your pages according to all the tips above, but you're still not happy with your bounce rate, try clearing the traffic flow to that page or adjusting it to handle your current traffic load. For example, if most of your traffic comes from AdWords, add a few negative keywords. If the source of traffic is Facebook, make sure that your landing page externally matches the needs of the Facebook audience - focus on its design.

Here are ten methods you can use to reduce the bounce rate on your pages. Just remember – you don’t want a 0% bounce rate, you just want to outrank your closest competitor’s sites in the search engine rankings.