By Carol Burns, Evolve Small Business Consulting

Websites are a vital tool today for any business, it does not matter what your business is – if you are not online you are missing out. Missing out on potential customers, on opportunities to build business contacts and the chance to cross market your products/services.

However, if your website does not engage your visitors – it is little better than having no website at all.

If you can engage visitors you might generate a sale, at the very least you are likely to generate a return visit, an enquiry or a referral to a friend. If however your visitors are not engaged – they will not buy.

One of the best ways to increase reader engagement is to make sure that your site architecture is simple and effective. It must be easy for the visitor to navigate their way around the site, that way, even if the first page they read does not result in a sale...the second or the third page might.

You will probably already be familiar with the term bounce rate; this is the percentage of initial visitors who leave your site after arriving at the entry page. In essence they are people who bounce straight off of your site and go elsewhere, having only looked at one page.

This is a critical piece of information for any site owner and with the introduction of easy to use analytics programmes like Google Analytics it is now really easy to establish and to analyse your bounce. A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail – which probably means that they like your site, it has engaged them and they want to find out more. Even if visitors are stumbling across your site by accident – a high bounce rate suggests that the site failed to engage them enough to even look at a second page.

It is important however that you keep your “bounce” figure in context. In my experience there are four “bounce components”.

1. Existing / repeat customers and loyal users
2. Direct links
3. Search engine traffic
4. Low-value referrers

Different visitors will relate to your website in different ways depending on their needs - this can very often be established by which of these four bounce components that the visitor falls into. Someone who has found your site via a search engine is probably interested in your subject matter, which is why they were searching in the first place. It should therefore be relatively easy to engage them and encourage them to view your site in detail. A repeat customer on the other hand will already be very familiar with your site and your service or product offering, so they may well just be looking for a quick update, a special offer, a blog entry etc. Once they have found that – they will immediately click away again.

If your visitor has come from a direct link on another site, again they probably have at least a passing interest in the subject matter, and you would expect to be able to engage them with your content. Someone who has simply stumbled across your site however (a low value referral) might realistically stumble away again just as quickly as they arrived.

It is therefore important when you are looking at your stats that you measure these four bounce components individually – and when comparing them to previous data they must be compared consistently. Bounce rate is a metric you’ll easily find in all web analytics tools...it is not the holy grail...please don’t treat it as such, but it will allow you to quickly focus on the important aspects of your site. It will show which pages need to be reworked and it will reveal where you are wasting precious advertising revenue.

I have worked with many clients over many years to refine their websites and help them to generate more business, and in all honesty it is hard to achieve bounce rates under 20%. In fact, as web traffic and web tourists increase achieving a 20% bounce rate is actually a pretty reasonable achievement. If your bounce rate exceeds 35%, there should be some alarm bells ringing, and you need to pay some more attention to your site. If your bounce rate exceeds 50% - there is a problem – which needs to be addressed quickly.

When analysing your bounce rate you also have to consider the following:

• If your bounce rate is reducing – are you generating more “sales”?
• When you look at the four bounce components – what is the variation? What is this telling you about your advertising sources?
• Can you influence the visitors’ habits by redesigning the page? Perhaps providing a clearer call to action? Perhaps by making your text more concise and engaging.
• Having established which pages are your most engaging, can you “push visitors” from those pages to those which “close the sale”?

Bounce rates, and analytics in general, should never be your sole focus, but they do play a vital part in understanding the performance of your site. If you use them correctly (and regularly) they will provide you with vital clues to your website performance, and they should set you on the right path to reviewing and revising your website.

First published on everywoman (www.everywoman.com)