Bounce Rate and How to Reduce It

What is Bounce Rate?

A bounce occurs when a person visits your church website and leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. This is the equivalent to a visitor attending your church and then leaving after they hear your opening prayer. The problem with this is obvious.

Bounce Rate is a term used in website traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page ÷ Total Number of Visits. 

Just as you want church visitors to stay longer than the first 10 minutes of your service, you want your website visitors to stay on your site long enough to learn about who you are as well as get connected to your ministry. Lowering your Bounce Rate is the key to achieving that goal.

A high Bounce Rate from any page means that your site's pages don’t give visitors any reason to stay, so making your homepage and other pages as relevant as possible to your visitors is crucial.

Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate and Keep Visitors on Your Site

1. Streamline Your Menu
Your menu is the most important tool to navigate your site. Visitors want to find information quickly and easily, so don't bog down your menu with too many choices. Limit your main menu categories to the 6-7 most important, and only include relevant pages (five or less) as sub-categories.

Use the example menu below as a good rule of thumb:


• Home
• About Us
  • Our History
    
  • Our Mission
  • What We Believe
  • Weekend Services
    
  • Staff
    
• Ministries
  • Men's Ministry
  • Women's Ministry
  • Student Ministry
  • Children's Ministry
  • Small Groups
    
• Media
  • Sermons
  • Videos
    
• Contact Us
• My Church

In a previous blog entry entitled, "Spring Cleaning for your Website," we talked about simplifying a site's menu by combining items and making it easier to navigate by using breadcrumbs--all great advice for helping your users find information.


2. Add Highlights with Thumbnails
On the sidebar or footer of each of your site's pages, news items, events, and other items is a space to include up to five highlights--links to other content on your site. Adding highlights that relate to the content on each page is an easy way to entice users to explore your website. For example, on the home page, you might include highlights for your "Weekend Services" page, "This Week's Sermon" blog, "Meet the Pastors" event, and "Our Mission" page. (See this help file to learn more about highlights.)

Include a thumbnail with your highlight to make it "pop" off the page. Read this help file to find out how to add thumbnails to your items.


3. Add Recent News or Events with Smart Tags
With Smart Tags, you can embed content from your site inside other content. To let your visitors see the latest happenings in your ministry, use Smart Tags to display the most recently added news and upcoming events. Here is an example of a page with events embedded within it.

You can also embed recent blog entries inside of other pages--so on your senior pastor's staff page, you can include the latest entries from his blog and connect with visitors on a more relational level.

Learn more about Smart Tags by clicking here.


4. Create Ads Which Link to Other Pages/Site Features
Ads on your site act to promote the content within. Use flashy images and compelling text to advertise other pages, blogs, photo galleries, or media.

Have a Podcast of your weekly sermon series? Create and ad which links to it and display it on your home page. Don't make visitors hunt for your features. Lead them there. Click here to learn how to create an ad.


5. Sign Up for Google Analytics
Utilizing free Google Analytics is an important step in understanding how your site traffic works. Analytics allows you to chart your Bounce Rate on individual pages or site-wide, creates reports that show your hits per day, month, or the change over the course of a year, and tracks clicks on individual links or ads. And that's only the beginning.

Once you plug your Google Analytics number into your iMinistries website, check out your bounce rates on this page. To learn more about statistics like this and how to use them, read this help file on adding your Google Analytics number to your iMinistries website.

Sources for This Blog and More Reading on Bounce Rates

What does Bounce Rate Mean? - Google Analytics