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8 Comments

What is your website's bounce rate?

Since launching fourdayweek.io I've noticed my bounce rate* looks to be insanely high (85%) so I was just wondering how I compare to everyone else and is 85% likely to be a problem for SEO?

Anyone had any success trying to reduce their bounce rate - if so, which methods worked?

From reading online, I've seen the following suggestions:

  • Reduce website load time
  • A single clear CTA
  • Add the number of internal links
  • Optimise mobile usability

The issue is, I kinda feel I already hit all of these requirements!

  • "The % of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site"
  1. 2

    Hello Phil,

    I visited your site and I actually found all the companies in the homepage, with no needed click.

    I liked it, it was very simple but I didn't click anywhere so it was officially a "bounce".

    If you really need to improve that bounce rate you'll need to invite the user to "keep browsing", maybe adding a pagination to that initial list... but take into consideration that this will only help you with this number, not necessarily the users.

    Congratulations for this project, by the way!

    1. 2

      Thanks man! and ye I've given up on trying to improve the bounce rate as I've deemed it (maybe naively :p) unimportant. Focusing more on page speed and content

  2. 2

    Every biz has different bounce rates. Besides the bounce rate, the avg. session duration and pages/session also provide some info.

    In the last 30 days, my site has 35% bounce rate, avg. session duration of 5:55, and 5.4 pages/session. I only compare it to my past performance. My goal is just to reduce the bounce rate and increase the duration and pages/session.

    But I think your bounce rate seems high. Pages/session is 1.7. To me, it seems that people don't check out your blog which only has 2 entries or go into job postings. Avg. session duration of 1:10 also confirms that people don't check out other pages much. Just my 2 cents.

  3. 2

    Hey Phil,

    I don't know your site so I'm speaking generally.

    An 85% bounce rate could actually be really amazing, depending on the bounce rate of your competitors. The thing is that bounce rate really isn't a relevant metric in most cases. What is important is whether you're converting enough of the remaining 15% to keep going.

    The reality is that most people have the attention spans of a mosquito, and depending on whether you've created something people need and are willing to pay for, even customers might not necessarily stick around for more than a few minutes. What percentage of sites that you visit do you ever visit again, organically?

    There are really only two metrics to pay close attention to as you build your business: what is your CAC (Cost to Acquire a Customer) and what is the average LTV (life-time value) of a customer?

    Acquiring customers is expensive. First, you have your sunk costs like building the product, rent, and potentially employees. Then you have to market your product and advertise, then you have to close a sale, then you have to provide support.

    You're far better off either borrowing someone else's customers (similar product) or selling your existing customers more stuff.

    Anyhow, if you can keep your CAC trending down and your LTV trending up, you will find that you're far less concerned with superficial churn. HTH!

    1. 1

      Brilliant, thanks very much - makes sense. I imagine calculating CAC & LTV must be pretty difficult in itself though

      1. 1

        Tech founders chronically underestimate how hard the non-tech parts are going to be, speaking from direct and painful experience as a (former) tech founder.

        You can likely Google up some solid worksheets for this kind of exercise, if it helps. You want to shoot for accuracy, but you'll never be dead-on as there's just too many variables. That said, if you come up with a process for these two metrics, you're miles further ahead than most founders.

        CAC is indeed harder, but like all hard problems, you break it down into smaller problems. Costs fall into three general categories:

        • sunk costs like hardware and whatever time/money you've spent building the product to date
        • recurring costs like rent and salaries, marketing + advertising
        • averaged per customer costs like AWS S3, support

        Total that all up, and divide it by the number of customers you have. Obviously it gets more accurate as you have more customers, but if you spend $1M and have one customer, your CAC is $1M. This could be fine, so long as they are paying you at least, what... $1.5M?

        LTV is easier, but takes longer. You take the average amount that the customer pays you each month, and multiply it by the number of months most customers stick around. If it's a one-shot deal, LTV is super easy to calculate!

        This brings me to the conclusion: there is only three ways to make more money. You can get more customers, charge existing customers more, or selling existing customers new stuff.

        Counterintuitively, I urge people to shoot for fewer customers that pay more, and not just because cheap customers are the worst customers from a support perspective.

        Most products are under-priced by 2x or more. It's understandable to be terrified that your customers will leave you if you raise your prices. What will actually happen is that your worst customers will leave, and your best customers will say nothing.

        However, the main place founders are leaving money on the table is that they focus on getting more customers instead of finding new things to sell to customers that already love and trust them.

        Getting customers is risky and expensive. You have to pay to get them up front (marketing, advertising), you have to pay to have them (AWS), you have to pay to keep them (support).

        Instead, ask your customers what other problems they have. Upsell them on support contracts. It costs nothing and the conversion rate is 10x higher.

        The smartest founders borrow existing customers from complimentary businesses and then sell them things they want. Shopify apps would be a prime example of the virtuous cycle in play.

        1. 1

          Thanks for going into so much detail, this is brilliant

  4. 1

    Hi Phil,

    we reduced our bounce rate by adding more content (public dashboard: https://pirsch.pirsch.io/). By adding more content on different sites, you give visitors something to look at. But still, a lot of visitors coming from non-organic traffic aren't really interested sometimes and will leave rather quickly.

    Your landing page and jobs page seems somewhat redundant. Maybe you should remove the list from your landing page and add something else instead, with a link to the list. The "Hiring?" page might be a good candidate for content that should go to your landing page, but your website looks really good already.

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