How To Track Website Visitors And Decrease Bounce Rate
18 May 2020
ContentMichael Signal
A high bounce rate on your website could be showing in a number of ways:
- You’re struggling to increase traffic to your site
- You can’t improve email signups or newsletter subscriptions
- You can’t increase lead conversion rates or acquire more clients
If you’re having any of these problems, a high bounce rate could be the root of your problems!
Bounce rates can be abysmal, to say the least – learning how to track website visitors, can mean that you will optimize your bounce rate and conversions.
How to Track Website Visitors
There are a number of ways to track your website visitors.
Getting a handle on your website tracking option is the first step to using your bounce rate to solve all your website traffic problems.
- The first way to accurately track your website traffic is to sign up for Google Analytics. It’s a free piece of software that allows you to dig deep into the traffic visiting your website.
- You need to understand exactly what Google Analytics can show you. You’ll want to track the following information:
– The number of visits you receive.
– The actual number of unique visitors you receive. This is different from the number of visits you receive, as a visitor can land on your website numerous times and count as a visit.
– Record and track your bounce rate.
– The behavior of your visitors on your website, how long fo they stay on your website, how many pages they navigate to and the journey they take on your website.
– The location of your visitors, where they are based, whether they are local and this can help you determine if you’re reaching your ideal target audience.
– How your website visitors are finding your website, where is the traffic coming from? Is it organic traffic? Are they landing on your website through a search engine or social media? What keywords are they using to find your website?
Using all this information can give you an in-depth insight into your website traffic, and allow you to use your bounce rate statistics to your advantage.
How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate
The first important thing to know about your bounce rate is that it indicates how many people are visiting your landing page and then exiting your website without navigating any further.
This means that you’re not immediately getting the attention of your website visitor and thus converting them to qualified leads.
1. Better Your User Experience
User experience on your website is paramount to decreasing your bounce rate. If the website visitor is having a good experience from the moment they land on your website, you’ll ‘convince’ them to stay longer.
Make your website easy to navigate and make important, useful information easy to find.
2. Create a Great Call to Action
Having a website with no call to action is like having a hotdog with no ketchup. When a visitor lands on your website, you almost need to tell them what you’d like them to do.
Create a call to action that asks them to subscribe, or directs them to your product pages.
3. Improve Your Website’s Speed
A slow website could be the reason that visitors are exiting early.
Make sure you analyze your website’s loading speed, you’ll want to aim for pages that only take a few seconds to load. The best page loading speed to get is 3 seconds or less.
Keep Tracking No Matter What
Knowing how to track website visitors is only half the job done.
The second part is to continue to do so, even if you’re getting the numbers you want. Calls-to-action can become dull and being to taper off so a change might be necessary.
The only way to continue to evolve and adapt your website is to keep tracking even if you’re performing.
Need more web design tips? Head on over to this section on our website.
Michael is the creative brains of the company and he leads the UX and UI team at EB Pearls. He has experience of over 20 years in interaction design and have designed digital products for Fortune 50 companies all over the world.
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