What is it? Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who bounce away from your website after arriving without ever clicking a link to other pages on your site. It is calculate by the following formula:

What does it mean? If your bounce rate is high, visitors are not engaging with your content, not able to use your navigation, or going elsewhere to find content because it either isn’t on your page or isn’t easy to find.

What’s considered a good bounce rate? There’s no real answer to this question as there are just too many variables. Generally 20% is considered really good. Over 35% means there’s room for improvement. Anything over 50% quite often means your site has serious problems.

How do I improve bounce rate? Ah, the million dollar question. Here are few tips that can help, plus the real answer at the bottom.

Make sure your site is accessible and meets web standards. This is where hiring a professional web developer who understands everything going on behind the visitor experience and who has an appreciation for standards is key. But also, keep your audience in mind — if you’re selling widgets to a primarily male audience, make sure your site can be viewed by the 7% to 10% of men who are red-green colorblind.

1. Clear calls to action. Let visitors know where they can click, where you’d like them to click, and how to find your most popular information such as how to contact you.
2. Update your site frequently, and make sure the new content is noted on the most popular entry pages. If visitors don’t see any changes in the page they usually come to visit, it’s unlikely they’ll click through to other pages.
3. Use your other analytics to guide you. This is where understanding all of your site’s data can really help. Use the search terms people are finding you using, and the most popular information to guide your site navigation and calls to action. Another example, if you discover through your analytics that most of your visitors are using a mobile device or browser, make sure your page renders quickly on mobile devices and beware of the limitations of those browsers. For instance, the iPhone can’t display Adobe Flash graphics or animations.

The best way to improve your bounce rate, and really all web key performance indicators, is to perform the following steps:

1. Test
2. Adapt.
3. Rinse, lather, repeat.

It is only by trying different permutations of your website that you can get a handle on what works for your audience, and what sends them off to Google to search out your competitors. Try 1 call to action for a few days, make note of how many people followed through with a click, and then try something different until you get a bounce rate you can accept.

If you’d like more information on understanding or improving your website, contact me.

Jay Baer has a great round-up of tools (and a little about techniques) on his blog today titled 39 Social Media Tools I’ll use today. I use a lot of the same tools.

And something I use that isn’t mentioned…

And my new favorite tool is Tumblr and the Tumblr iPhone app. Tumblr is the easiest way to blog anything. I tried Tumblr awhile back and it was interesting, but not quite there. But now, combined with the iPhone app, it’s an incredible bit of technology.

I can open up my iPhone app anywhere, take a photo, write a few lines, and even record audio right from the phone. Then with a single click publish my new content to the blog, Twitter, and Facebook simultaneously.

I know there are other ways to accomplish that, but Tumblr is the easiest way I’ve found. I’ve been playing with the tool while operating my new silly site–Steal my Idea.

Tumblr isn’t as full featured or flexible as running your own Wordpress blog, but it’s very efficient and easy to get going.

Hugh Macleod, author of Ignore Everybody has the best keys to social media marketing I’ve ever read.

1. Figure out what your gift is, and give it to them on a regular basis. 2. Make sure it’s received as a real gift, not as an advertising message. 3. Then figure out exactly what it is that your trail of breadcrumbs leads back to.

This echos some of the points I made in my post about being successful online. Most social media experts tend to focus on the engagement part of social media, which is crucial, but tend to gloss over what that actually means or how to begin. Engaging with your audience begins with giving.

Mr. Macleod does this via his cartoon a day email list. Gary Vaynerchuk does it by giving video content about wine and business away for free. Nick Campbell does it by giving away tutorials that you can’t find anywhere else. Chase Jarvis does it by giving back via his blog, but also through real opportunities for photographers to meet and learn from him and each other. David Nightingale does it by giving away tips and techniques about how he makes his amazing photographs. BH Photo does it be providing free webinars, Radian6 does so as well.

All of these people are providing real value to their communities for nothing, but leaving a little trail of crumbs that leads back to whatever it is they do to put food on the table for their families.

For me, it’s getting real old watching all these great companies get left behind because they’re too busy planning how to take action instead of just doing it. Every single day I’m encountering organizations that chew up days, weeks, and months talking about a strategy for their online presence.

I’m not sure how it got started, but I think it grew out of this concept that marketing is done in 30 second slots, and that great campaigns are built around a single idea that gets replicated over many different channels (posters, billboards, tv, magazines, etc.). Neither of those models make any sense on the web.

I see hours spent trying to determine the ROI on social media — if we spend $XXX,XXX what’s the return in real dollar amounts? User experience specialists hold long drawn out sessions to determine what button goes where, and may you die of lightning strikes if you make it the wrong color. What about SEO, don’t we need to make sure that our keywords are ‘optimized’? And chief among the complaints and strategizing–where do we find the resources to create content?

Starting today, all that kind of wheel spinning crap is dead to me.

It’s not that strategy isn’t important; it’s that it’s just not that complicated.

Here’s how the strategy for any organization online should go:
1) Determine who you want to connect with
2) Start talking to those people
3) Listen
4) Adapt

That’s it.

Go do.