How to Reduce your Blog Bounce Rate..

Recently one of my dear Facebook friends shared a post with me regarding reducing the bounce rate of the blog. The article was incredible and I implemented the same on my blog.Surprisingly my bounce rates were dropped from 80% to 30% in couple of days, which is a remarkable change.

If you don't know, a bounce is when a visitor lands on your blog post and leave your blog right after reading the first post without moving to the next post is considered as bounce.The total number of views to the views which are bounces is considered as bounce rate. 

Generally blogs like this one have higher bounce rate as most of the visitors lands on a blog post and reads it then leaves the blog. Lower the bounce rate the better. Again bounce rate also depends on the niche of the blog. Though Google has quoted that they don't consider bounce rate as a factor in rankings, they might consider this in future for sure to filter good trusted websites.

Quick Tweak to Fix Bounce Rate:

There are many traditional ways to reduce bounce rates like decreasing the page load time, interlinking the blog posts and many others. But, in this post I am going to share a quick tweak to the Google Analytics code which can reduce your bounce rate dramatically.

How the Normal Google Analytics Code Looks Like:

If you have installed Google Analytics code for tracking the visitors count then below is how the code looks like

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Modified Analytics Code:

The below is tweaked code which will dramatically reduce your bounce rate by 60-90%.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  setTimeout(function() {
    window.onscroll = function() {
      window.onscroll = null; // Only track the event once
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'scroll', 'read']);
    }
  }, 5000);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Note: All you have to do is change XXXXXXX with your Google Analytics ID which you can find easily from the original code.

The below is a screenshot of the Analytics Report before and after implementing the Tweak: 

How it Works? 

Google Analytics wait's till the second event is triggered, that means unless the visitor clicks on other page of your site the visit will be considered as bounce.

What did we do to the code?

We triggered the actual code and did some modification for a fair measure of bounce rate.This code considers only those visitors who left the site within the first 5 seconds.We also added one more parameter to the code, i.e if a visitor scrolls down to read the webpage the visit will no more be considered as bounce.

Final Words:

Google Analytics official blog has confirmed that we can adjust the bounce rate to our need and analyse the performance of the site/blog.You can tweak the above adjusted code as well and change the delay time for your own needs.

By Prasant