Wacdesigns | Technology, Web 2.0 and Life

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

Definition: A bounce occurs when a person leaves your website after reaching your entry page. The above cases can be considered equally as bounces from your website.

1) Visitor enters your site and press back immediately (before or even after the page has loaded)

2) Visitor waits for the page to load stays on this page for some time and then press back or navigate on another site. ( In this case the visitor might have found the information and then chose to navigate elsewhere to either find some supplementary information. Or it could be that he/she might not have found it but just read some pieces to see what is there, a third case could be the persons did not like the: website, content or colors on the site and went away.)

Therefore there seems to be considerable number of aspects to take into consideration to get a more precise question about “Why is my bounce rate so high ?”. There isn’t any straight forward answer to this question, but there are many questions that can lead to possible solutions:

When you ask your questions about bounce rate here are the different questions that might come to your mind.

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

User Interface
Is my layout/presentation/design attractive to visitors ?
Does my pages load slowly ?
Do my page have appropriate ads ? Are these ads non-aggressive towards the user ?
Is your page browser friendly ? (Can be views at any resolution with any browser the same way)

Content

Does  the user find what they are looking for ? ( High bounce rate and high time on site visits)
Is there enough information to show to the user ? Do I display enough or too much ?
From keywords analysis are the entry keyword valid for the content that the entry page ?

These are few questions, and there are much more that can come across when you want to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Personally I think that depending on your audience your bounce rate will always vary. There will be always accidental clicks (people make mistakes).

As mentioned on Bounce Rate article on Wikipedia: Taking the example of news site, which have all their information on the first page itself. People might just scan the page and then exit to another website. News website might just be off having 80% bounce rate with a satisfied visitor who was able to have what he came for. From this point of view: Informative website will most likely have high bounce rate compared to E-Commerce one’s for example where you must navigate on several page to be able to perform a checkout.

A word of conclusion:

Source Wikipedia:
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

References and useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/how-high-is-your-bounce-rate/2006/02/09/

It’s been not nearly a year since I last used Windows Live Writer, there seems to have been a lot of enhancement and changes compared to the first version that i have tried up. Today, I’ll be giving a try to the beta version (Build 14.0.5025.904). The setup was quiet easy and straight forward, warning me that I must enable XML-RPC on my blog before I can continue.

The first thing I installed is the S3 Object plug-in, to be able to upload images directly to my Amazon S3 account and use them on this post.

This image comes from my S3 bucket.

There are many feature such as the Insert Map: Let’s try it out and point out Mauritius for example

Where i live.

Nice. I have also created a Marker (Push Pin). Which does not seem to appear, When you create a map on Windows Live Messenger, it’s not the actual map that appears but an image with a link to the actual map…

Some other comment: There is to a problem, when there are connection cuts. The application just hangs during an operation. It was the case for my first post. Hope that is will be happen.

Conclusion a very nice and elaborated tool for blogging. I’ll will be trying it for a fews days and will send some feedback on this post. Or create a new one if need be.

My previous article to Windows Live Writer can be found here

These two seems to be in need of some bucks.. HELP THEM !!!

Post your comments for the karate girl here.

Post your comments for the kung fu guy here.

If you are wondering what are the choices you have to make share and backup your files, you might easily be able to find hundreds of alternative on the web today. Each one with their different features and technologies.

I came across 2 free tools that i use for my backup and file sharing:

MozyHome Remote Backup

MozyHome is a small application that runs on background and backups any folder that you configure it to. It will encrypt and then upload your files to your 2 GB free space. You have several tools to enable you to them restore any lost files. Nice for uploading document, project files. You have also the paid version with unlimited space.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a new tool, that just got public last week. It’s similar to Mozybackup with 2 GB free space and the posibility of backup your files. With some extra features such as file sharing and automatic sync. Personally I use it to share files only. Since your files need to be in the DropDox folder (Similar concept and LiveMSN sharing folder) to be able to share.

It also allows sharing of files and give you a nice public URL that you can easily send to the person you want to share your files with. The only lacking features i might see here, is that you can’t share an entire folder with files inside. i.e When you want to share several photos you can’t directly get a link to the folder. You must share it with someone that already has Dropbox. A feature that would enable a link to a zip version of an entire folder could be nice.