How to Lower Bounce Rate with Surveys

How to lower bounce rate is a common contemplation among marketers, market researchers and business owners. As one of the main issues across digital marketing, the omnipresent bounce rate is a constant concern.

While the average bounce rate sits at a range between 26% and 70%, an acceptable bounce rate range is far lower. Many brands struggle with lowering their bounce rate to a more acceptable industry range.

There are various digital marketing methods to lower the bounce rate; some pertain to specific industries, while others are more generalized. A seldom but potent way to reduce your bounce rates is by way of conducting effective survey studies. 

This article delves into how to lower bounce rate with surveys, so that you can improve your website and apps’ digital performance. This will allow you to elongate digital journeys, the time spent on your site and the interest surrounding your content.

Understanding the Bounce Rate

Before tackling how to lower bounce rate, you should have a concrete understanding of what it is. Bounce rate is a negative metric, that is, it measures the rate of an action that marketers ought to mitigate. 

Specifically, bounce rate is the percentage of website (or app) visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. There are certain circumstances that constitute leaving a page: this can occur via closing a tab, closing a browser, hitting the back button, typing in another domain in the URL on clicking an external link. 

This metric is undesirable on several accounts: first off, it reduces web traffic. It also reduces the time spent on a website, as browsing several pages often results in a longer time spent on a website. 

But most importantly, the bounce rate is an unfavorable metric as it shows that your landing pages do not appeal to your visitors. First impressions are critical — even in the digital space. As such, a high bounce rate points to disinterest, boredom or lack of satisfaction with a page. 

Perhaps your visitors didn’t find the information they were looking for, or perhaps they were routed to a landing page via social media and upon entry, they lost interest. As such, high bounce rates occur when landing pages (or any web pages) fail to engage.

Market research, particularly surveys can help the lower bounce rate. 

Bounce Rate Calculation

The calculation for this rate is rather simple. 

Divide the total number of one-page visits by the total number of website visits. Then multiple the quotient (the result of the division) by 100 to get the percentage. 

For example: A website receives 50 single-page visits and 180 total website visits. 

50/180 = 0.2777777
0.2777777 x 100 = 27.777 or 27.78%
Bounce rate = 27.78%

Although you can calculate the bounce rate whenever you need to, a good rule of thumb is to pay particular attention to it whenever you release new content. For example, say you created a new resource page or added new marketing collateral to an existing page. 

In these instances, you ought to compute the bounce rate to understand their performance. You can also compare it to the more stagnant pages on your website. 

What Makes a Good and Bad Bounce Rate

As an undesirable metric, your bounce rate ought to be kept on the lower end of the spectrum. Lower bounce rates indicate higher levels of website engagement, which is critical for a number of business purposes: from branding to building customer loyalty.

To control your bounce rate, you first must understand which range indicates a “bad” bounce rate, that is, one that’s too high, which constitutes a “good” or healthy bounce rate and which is considered average. The following breaks up the bounce rate into three categories based on reports of average bounce rates. 

When this rate reaches 70 percent and above, you ought to strategize on how to lower it, as it represents a deficiency in both content quality and UX. A rate this high is going to trickle down to fewer conversions. 

However, a high bounce rate is only dismaying for content aside from blogs, news, events, and anything that requires a significant amount of reading — which introduces a new aspect of bounces. 

Are All Bounces Terrible?

This aspect points to the fact that not all bounces are bad. As such, it is essential to factor in the context of your bounce rate. Take the following scenarios:

If you have a high bounce rate on a product page, in which the visitor leaves without purchasing or signing up for, say, a newsletter, then it is evidently a bad thing. If your visitor were to visit several such pages, thus, avoiding a bounce and lowering your bounce rate, it is good, even if they don’t convert. 

This is because avoiding a bounce in this scenario shows that the visitor is interested in browsing your products. In the former scenario, a bounce on a product page shows that they are not interested in exploring your other products or site, and bouncing to a competitor site is a major possibility. 

As such, bounces on product pages, landing pages and all others that require taking an action (converting) is a bad incidence. 

However, some pages with high bounce rates do not necessarily connote a bad sign. Consider content-heavy pages, especially those with no CTA for further action, such as downloading a report or signing up for email notifications. 

For example, let’s say a visitor is consuming a long blog post, report, article or news content. They may then bounce. Regardless, the page they consumed was engaging enough for them to read through the whole thing, thus contributing to longer times spent on the site. 

Additionally, after reading the content, the visitor may have deemed your content authoritative, fostering future site visits. Or, it may have nurtured a lead further down the sales funnel. This is far more valuable than a site visitor who travels across various site pages (thus avoiding bounces) without reading or paying attention to the content and elements. 

Bounce Rates Benchmarks Across Industries

Bounce rates fluctuate from brand to brand and the same oscillation applies to different industries. This occurs from a number of different factors such as:

• The nature of the industry
• The average UX efforts and updates made on digital platforms across industries
• The content-heavy nature of industries 
• Type of website

Bounce Rate Benchmarks by Website Type and Page Type:

The following presents data on benchmarks based on the type of website and webpage from Custom Media Labs. 

Bounce Rate Benchmarks by Industry:

The following presents data on benchmarks across different industries in late 2020 by a report from SimilarWeb and others.

How to Lower Bounce Rate with Surveys

You may have pondered how to lower the bounce rate through a practical route. While you cannot extinguish the bounce rate, you can lessen it by improving your website in a number of ways. Most marketing websites will provide you with advice on lowering your bounce rate in the following two ways:

1. Improving your user experience (UX)
2. Fleshing out your content offerings

On the contrary and far less conventional, you ought to use surveys to reduce your bounce rate. Although slashing this rate may seem to be a feat, surveys help in that they find the disconnect between your visitors’ (and customers’) expectations from your webpages and what your webpages actually provide. 

Businesses can use surveys to minimize the bounce rate for both B2C and B2B businesses. You can achieve the latter by implementing B2B surveys. If one of your biggest concerns around your bounce rate involves your content performance, you can deploy surveys for a content marketing strategy.  

What to Ask in the Survey to Lower Bounce Rate

First off, you can ask respondents specifically what they look for in a particular landing page, product page, etc. In such a case, it is best to use multiple-selection multiple-choice questions, that is, questions that allow respondents to tick off more than just one answer.

This is especially useful if you deploy surveys across digital channels as part of an online survey platform. In this case, these surveys will be on websites (and apps) that are not yours, thus, you ought to ask for their specific needs.

You should also ask questions with visual elements (images, GIFs, etc) displaying your own digital elements. This way, respondents can see the makeup of your page and divulge their opinions of it. This question is especially viable when you use it to inquire about pages with the highest bounce rates. 

Incorporating direct questions is another way to survey respondents to lower your bounce rate. For example, you can ask specifically what would make the respondents bounce. Piggybacking off of this concept, you ought to include questions that ask respondents to choose between a set of visuals, which represent pages or page elements. 

They should choose the best and worst kinds from a set of images. You can also ask them to rate these pages/elements via a rating scale question or a Matrix question. 

Setting Reasonable Expectations

The bounce rate is a metric you will often contend with. While bounces are not necessarily a grave issue on all site pages, certain pages, such as landing pages and product pages can do without high bounce rates. 

Although known mainly as market research tools, surveys can provide the ultimate remedy on how to lower bounce rate. This is because surveys allow you to question your respondents on virtually anything, thus gaining you access into their psyche and needs from landing pages, etc.

When using survey research to crack down on your bounce rates, the key is finding the most apt online survey tool to house your surveys. Such as tool should make it easy to not merely set up and deploy your surveys, but make them hyper-targeted, so that only your target market and desired respondents can take part in it.

It should also automate quality checks to rein in survey bias and low-quality data. When you’re equipped with the correct online survey platform, you’re set to tackle lowering your bounce rates.