Knowing Your Practice Bounce Rate and How to Decrease It
Your practice’s website is a sum of many parts. These parts range from “meet the team” and bio pages to articles on specific procedures and services. You may have a “hunch” that some pages are being received better by your patients and community than others.
Website metrics can confirm these hunches, or these quantitative findings can be surprising. You may find that other pages are not being read or visited.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Website metrics include page views, page duration, session duration, pages viewed, and bounce rate.
- Disruptions including alerts, notifications, and pop-ups could contribute to a high bounce rate.
- Insights about website performance can help you take proactive measures to prevent patients from bouncing from the website.
WHAT IS A BOUNCE RATE?
Bounce rate is another top indicator, or metric. “Bounce” refers to the percentage of users, or visitors, to your website who load one page. They do not interact with the page. They do not visit or load any other pages. They simply bounce from the website and, presumably, go someplace else. This calculation is determined by dividing the total number of “one-and-done page visits” by the total number of visitors.
For example, if 60 people visit only one page out of 200 visitors, the bounce rate is 30%.
These metrics matter because a lower bounce rate indicates more visits to other pages and suggests greater engagement. Generally, the lower the bounce rate, the better.
HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) firm, reports that your practice’s website bounce rate should be between 26% and 40%.1 So, the 30% example bounce rate would be considered a more-than-respectable goal.
As with other metrics, the bounce rate evolves. Monitor on an ongoing basis. By taking a longer view with continual monitoring, you may find clues as to “why” your bounce rate rose in a given period. For example, a recent “refresh” may be having the opposite of its intended result. You may be overwhelming visitors with annoying and persistent pop-ups, surveys, chatbot notifications, and alerts to subscribe to such-and-such offerings.
Key metrics to monitor include:
Page views – Total number of times a page is viewed (the same visitor can reload a page several times).
Page duration – Average time that is spent on a given page.
Session duration – Average length of time that visitors spend on your website.
Pages viewed – Average number of pages that are viewed during each session.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IF YOUR BOUNCE RATE IS HIGH
First, do not panic. Emotions tend to result in rash decisions that are not in the best interest of your practice. There are numerous reasons “why” your bounce rate may be high. You need to identify what may be responsible for unfavorable percentages. Only then can you develop strategies to reduce a high bounce rate. Be sure that goals for improvement are realistic. It is very rare to have a bounce rate that falls under 25%.
A few common reasons for high bounce rates include:
- A website that is not correctly optimized for mobile/smartphone use.
- Website pages take too long to load.
- A website that is difficult, clunky, or confusing to navigate.
- Alerts, notifications, pop-ups, and other disruptions.
- Unclear CTAs (calls to action), so users may not know what to do or how to interact with your site once they get there.
- Content-related issues; disconnect between the keywords that patients are searching for and the content that is on your site.
- Poor quality content, which could range from simplistic, trying too hard with “clickbait,” to overly professorial, jargon-laden, and technical articles.
BEST PRACTICES FOR LOWER BOUNCE RATES
The next steps to decrease the bounce rate depend on your specific situation. How you fix the first few bullet points related to technical issues and website design differs dramatically from how the latter, content-oriented items may be addressed.
Best practices that support lower bounce rates include:
- Choose the right keywords that align with your desired patients and demographics.
- Ensure there are multiple “landing pages” with unique and appealing content and keywords.
- Review and tweak the meta descriptions/short summaries of the pages that come up when visitors search online for specific services and by specific keywords.
- Optimize “user-friendliness.”
- Ensure that the pages are sensibly organized.
- Make sure there is sufficient white space.
- Alter fonts that may be too small or hard to read.
- Integrate bullet points, section breaks, and other ways to divvy up typed content on a page.
- Ensure little to no self-loading multimedia content is slowing down your page loading times.
- Take steps to eliminate disruptions, such as chatbots that continuously pop up—they may be doing more harm than good.
- Regularly audit for engaging, clear, timely, credible, memorable, and meaningful content on services, staff, aesthetic topics, and products as relevant.
Knowing is half the battle. With quantifiable and regular insights about website performance, you can take proactive measures to prevent potential patients from bouncing from your digital practice “home.”
AT A GLANCE
- Know the key website metrics to monitor.
- Track your bounce rate.
- Learn measures to decrease your bounce rate.
1. Zantal-Wiener A. What Is Bounce Rate? (And How Can I Fix Mine?). blog.hubspot.com. Published April 28, 2014. Updated January 3, 2022. Accessed October 22, 2024. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-bounce-rate-fix?hubs_content=blog.hubspot.com%2Fwebsite%2Fengagement-metrics&hubs_content-cta=Bounce%20rate
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