What leads to increase in bounce rate?

Bounce rate is very important metrics for any site.It is one of the factors which helps in measuring user experience .When bounce rate increases it means more people are exiting your site without navigating to  other page.Increase in bounce can negatively impact conversion of your site.However,there are instances when the bounce rate increase but the conversion of your site has not dropped.
                                              In terms of google bounce is when the user exit your site without navigating to even one page of your site.The change in navigation of your site can impact the bounce rate of the site.The various scenario when bounce rate can increase

1.Removal of navigation links:

When the page is revamped ,there are chances that some of the links on the site which user used to clicks were removed.The removal of links can increase the bounce rate.Therefore before removing any links its clicks should be analyzed before taking a decision of removing the link

2.Change in interaction of site:

The change in site interaction may reduce the page navigation of site.For eg. before when click on photos if user is taken on page and now if he is navigated to a popup  then Google does not regard it as page navigation which increase bounce rate but is  not actually a bounce.In order to ascertain this the navigation should be changed to check the impact on bounce rate

3.Decrease in richness of information

When the information shown in site is not enough for user to make decision it will leads to increase in bounce rate.For eg..In one of pages price which is an important paramater was not displayed for many properties due to which bounce was high.When the price was updated for the properties it led to significant decrease in the bounce rate and also led to improvement in conversion of the page

Before concluding anything from bounce rate once should analyze the reason behind increase in bounce rate and based on that appropriate action should be taken.

4.Mismatch between user expectation and landing page

When the user is landing to a page which does meet the need of user it leads to increase in bounce rate..In generally happens in case of display traffic when the intent of user is clearly not known.

How to measure user experience

Improving User experience is one of the most important tasks which every product manager focuses on.There has been a lot of talks on how to make user centric design.User centric designs aims at achieving user goals.The question which lies at the end is whether the user experience have improved or not .How to measure it?In this post I would list down various metric through which one can measure the improvement in user experience

1. Improvement in repeat users in direct traffic

When the direct traffic repeat users are increasing it means that people you came last time to your Site/APP have found value in your site and that is why they are visiting again.Any site which has increase in repeat user in direct traffic can be sure that the user is finding more value in your site 

      2. Reduction in Bounce rate

Over a period of time if the bounce rate reduces it means out of total user coming to your site less people are going off without doing some action which means more users find your site more relevant to your need.

To know more about bounce rate please refer
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en

Note: The bounce can change when the navigation of the site changes .In case this is the case then we should not consider this parameter

      3.Improvement in conversion

Conversion means how many user coming to your site and how many are converting as per your goals.When this number improves it means that more user are finding what they need and therefore converting more than before.It should be noted that the conversion here should be directly through site/APP and not through calling.

     4.Increase in pages/session

When pages/session is increasing it means user is viewing more pages on your site than before which means that stickiness of your site has improved and user is now more engaged on your site.This especially applies to sites which are content driven as well as lead driven.

     5.Improvement in time spent

This metric is mainly applicable for the content based site.When the user is spending more time on your site it means the content on the site is valuable to the user and user want to spend more and more time in order to know more.In case of ecommerce site increase in time spent can be positive as well as negative because it may mean that users are either not able to easily find the information they need or they are finding very good options so spending more time.When response are increasing with time spent then it many be considered positive

                                                                     The metric discussed can be seen in isolation improvement in single metric does not guarantee improvement in user experience.

In case of any comments please feel free to post it .I will reply it to the best of my ability.