What is Bounce Rate?

What is bounce rate? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we are once again diving headfirst into the world of analytics and specifically, we're talking about bounce rate.

Some of you may already be familiar with the term bounce rate and you've probably seen it in Google Analytics or in some of your marketing reports. But what exactly does it mean? Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of visitors who land on a particular page of your website and then leave without taking any further action. In simple terms, they bounce away from your site. They go in on one page, decide they don't like it, for whatever reason, and they exit the website. Imagine one of your prospective clients searching for, let's say, a divorce lawyer in Miami. They click on your website. They're eager to learn more about your services or the offer that you're presenting, but then, within a few seconds, for whatever that reason is, they hit that back button and they vanish into the digital abyss. That, my friends, is a bounce.

And, of course, we've talked about remarketing and other tactics that can help you capitalize on users who bounce and try to get them to reengage. But understanding and managing your bounce rate is still really pivotal for optimizing your online presence and high bounce rates often spell trouble for your online marketing efforts. Here's why, first and foremost, a high bounce rate can be an indicator of poor user experience. Maybe your website is loading way too slow, or it has a really confusing layout, with lots of long menus and too many things to click, or it just lacks engaging content. Visitors aren't going to stick around because something just isn't quite right for them, and if you don't address these issues, you are losing potential clients before you even have a chance to make your pitch. But since this bounce rate can be the result of one of a million little problems, how do you diagnose what's actually causing the issue? Let's start by examining the pages with the highest bounce rates. You can do this in analytics. Are these landing pages, where visitors are first arriving, or are these pages that are deeper within your website? Testing where people are actually bouncing can help you pinpoint trouble spots in the content, and then breaking down where those users are coming from will start to guide you to where the problem is actually originating. So you can optimize to prevent it. Because once you've identified these problem areas, you need to work to improve them. This might mean just speeding up the speed of your website, or reorganizing your content, structure of your website, cutting down on menu mania, or testing different calls to action and figuring out what users will respond to the most in your content. The key is to make your site more user-friendly and more engaging, at least to the best of your ability. And then we just test the bejesus out of everything. But before we go.

Not all bounces are created equal. Some are just the nature of things in legal marketing and in marketing in general. For example, if someone is searching for, let's say, how to file a small claims lawsuit and they land on your page discussing personal injury law, it's not surprising that they're going to bounce. They were looking for something different. That doesn't mean we ignore that bounce per se, but this is where understanding the intent of your website visitors really comes into play, and understanding your search queries and terms and all of that really fun stuff. And as we're creating content, we really need to constantly be aligning what we're doing in our content with what the target audience is really looking for.

And there are caveats to this we're not going to get into, but by and large, this is the highest probability play you can make when it comes to attracting and retaining the right kind of visitors on your website. But, like I said, where these users are coming from plays a role in all of this as well. If you're running pay-per-click or pushing traffic through social media and through email, the numbers are going to look entirely different there than they would for just your typical organic search traffic. Ppc, for example, is probably going to have an infinitely higher bounce rate than your organic stuff. So it's important not only to be prepared for that, but to remember to filter it specifically if it's not what you're trying to optimize for.

And you may have noticed that I haven't mentioned any specific benchmarks for bounce rate. I haven't said what's good or bad, and I'm not going to, because that's really just hyper-specific to each website, to each market and to what you're doing. And, like I said, today's episode is a quick one, but that's because we're going to be back soon to talk about more marketing metrics. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenavertisingcom for more. Thanks.