Why Are My Social Media Bounce Rates So High?
by MGB2B
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools in your social media arsenal. The data you gather from it can tell you what types of content your audience prefers and how they’re most likely to find it. You may discover that the content that drives the most visits to your website from search might not do the same from social. You also might realize that while visitors are landing on your white papers page (for example) from your social platforms, they are immediately leaving, or “bouncing.” So what is causing your high bounce rates from social media and how can you lower them?
First, what is a bounce rate, as it pertains to web traffic? A bounce rate, as defined by Google, is “the percentage of sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.” While Google uses the term “sessions,” I am going to continue referring to these as visits. Both sessions and visits refer to the number of users who landed on your page, not specifying unique or repeat traffic.
Your website has an overall bounce rate, which, if things are going well, is probably somewhere between 40% to 55%. Naturally, people are going to land on your page looking for something else or will need to leave it for one reason or another. But as a rule of thumb, at least half of the visitors to your site should take some sort of action, whether that’s clicking to another page, filling out a form, or downloading a piece of content. When your overall website bounce rate creeps up higher than 60% or 70%, you should start looking for issues.
When it comes to high bounce rates from social media, however, 70% or higher is all too common for B2B companies. But why? Consider one of the top pages you send social media users to and ask yourself a few questions:
Is the content that my social media posts are promoting visible? There are few things more frustrating in the digital world than clicking on a link expecting to find ABC, only to find XYZ. It’s a BuzzFeedy strategy than can work to boost website clicks and lower bounce rates, but only if the content that’s being promoted is actually somewhere on the page. For example, you are tweeting about your latest manufacturing white paper, and while it’s at the top of the page you’re sending users to, so are several other white papers that might pique users’ interest. What won’t work to lower your high bounce rates from social media is tweeting about a great new piece of content, only to send users to a totally unrelated page. That will surely prompt a user to leave your site before interacting with it (and possibly not come back).
Is there an obvious call to action on this page? If you are sending users to your most recent blog entry from a social media post, it’s pretty obvious that reading is the action they’re expected to take. But if you are dropping visitors onto a page where your ultimate goal is to collect their contact information, then you need to have a very clear call to action to make that happen. Don’t rely on the social media post the user clicked on, even if it clearly read “fill out the form to download,” to drive the user to action. A user clicking away from the page for a moment, taking a phone call, or not fully reading the tweet could all result in confusion if the page they land on does not feature a clear call to action.
Can users easily navigate to other parts of my site from this page? Perhaps the blog post that you promoted on LinkedIn that drove the user to your site in the first place isn’t quite what they were looking for. They might scroll up looking for a navigation bar so they can explore other parts of your website. But if your blog page doesn’t feature such navigation, they might just throw curiosity to the wind and close the page. A user that could have become a lead is now onto other things.
In all three of these scenarios, a user was driven from a social media post to your website, only to leave it before taking any action. These issues are likely reasons why your bounce rates are sky high. By presenting your content clearly, giving users an obvious call to action, and offering them a way to explore the rest of your site where appropriate, you can drastically lower your high bounce rates from social media.
Your social media channels’ proprietary analytics can also reveal valuable insights into how users interact with your content. Take a look at your top tweets, LinkedIn posts, and other updates by engagement to determine which times of day, phrasing, and platform best drive users to your site. For example, a tweet about your latest white paper shared after working hours may have received plenty of likes, but not many clicks. Try sharing the white paper again, but this time in the morning on LinkedIn, and see how it performs.
Like much of what you do online for your B2B company, lowering your high bounce rates from social media takes a certain amount of trial and error. Testing and tweaking your strategy will help you hit the right users at the right time. And making improvements to your website will benefit your bounce rate from social as well as your site’s overall user experience.
Want to learn more about lowering your bounce rates from social media? Drop us a line.
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