This article identifies common problems of a home based business with having high bounce rates. Provides details of the problem and possible solutions.
Unless you are talking about which brand name of laundry dryer sheets are the best, when it comes to managing a home based business website – "bounce" is not a good thing. Sadly, in the world of online internet marketing it happens more times than not.
If you have one of the mega-websites with tons of traffic, revenue and sales, perhaps you will not care as much. Likewise, if you have a quick hit single page website for marketing and sales of a single product, bounce does not affect you. But for the rest of us, bounce is a critical flaw in home business activities.
Bounce occurs when someone finds their way to a page on our website and leaves immediately from the "landing page" without going anywhere else on our website. Internet marketing trends clearly show an ever increasing rise in the amount of traffic which falls into this pattern.
The common or typical term for indicating this is "bounce rate". Bad news is, this is bad for your business. Rather than a fixed number, bounce rates are stated as a percentage. Similar to the game of golf, a high score is not good! Bounce rates can be as high as 80%-90%. On the other hand a bounce rate of 30%-40% (or lower) is a good thing. In this case the lower the better. Personally, I use 35% as a realistic goal for the majority of websites I manage.
Unfortunately, this can happen due to a number of factors and situations. The search engines for example continually review (crawl) web pages for content and relevant keywords. Those keywords are reported back and used to send people searching the web to your site. Problem is -- this does not mean that traffic landing on your website is looking for what you have to sell. For example, if you website specializes in jelly beans. If I am searching for "pinto beans" the search engines pick up "beans" from your website content. My search sends me to your website. Sadly, visitors like this will leave your website in seconds. Your bounce rate just went up! If you paid for my "click", you lose. My visiting your website with no chance of a sale, you lose again.
For a home based business entrepreneur this even worse. This can be especially hard if you paid for traffic with the pay-per-click search engines (such as Google, MSN, or Yahoo). Or if you have worked hard like many of us to keep current content through articles and popular products flowing through your website. Either way, high bounce rates can have a devastating impact on you home business.
The good news is, you can do something about it. First and foremost, get a good tracking program going and monitor the results. Most web hosts now include statistical information on websites hosted on their servers. You need to get started today using the free reports.
Another good source of stat data (if you use pay-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords) is the "analytics" and reports provided as a part of these programs. They are a wealth of information, including bounce rates (even down to the individual keyword level).
As an alternative do a few searches on various software and online service applications that include lots of website statistics. Do a few searches, you will find lots of possibilities.
Once you have a method in place to track and monitor your progress, you need to establish specific goals and activities for reducing your bounce rates. Your goal should be to reduce your current bounce rate. If improved, this could increase your revenue and profits. Tracking, monitoring, taking action, then tracking and monitoring all over again should be an ongoing practice.
A future article will cover specifics about actions and activities you might undertake to reduce bounce to your business websites. This article was intended to be a primer to make you aware of the issue and hopefully compelled to do something about it!
We can not make this problem go away. It takes awareness and proactive actions to carefully manage. What is important to note is that keeping your bounce (bounce rate) as low as possible is an ongoing battle. You must closely and continually monitor the stats for your website and take appropriate action as necessary. You will be glad you did. Good news is that you will be rewarded with more revenue and profits!
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