Recently Natasha and Anthony Connor engaged Ryan North from Evolve Design to do a ground-up redesign of their website Surgery Interior Design.

Surgery Interior Design

Natasha and Anthony run an interior design practice, and specialise in surgery design.

The final design that Ryan delivered was to a very high standard, and presented their work in a clean, attractive way. Natasha and Anthony were very pleased with the new look. And so were the visitors to the website.

Now the visitors to the website didn’t send in comments saying ‘great design’, instead we could watch them – courtesy of Google Analytics – vote with their mouse.

The biggest change Natasha noticed was that the bounce rate dropped to zero. I thought she had made a mistake, but after checking it was clear the bounce rate had gone to zero just after the redesign, and was now averaging around 2% – well down from the average of 40%.

This isn’t a new site. The domain and content have been up for enough time for the analytics to show consistent trends.

This is the view from Google Analytics of the month when the design was applied (click to enlarge):

Bounce Rate Drops 40% to 2%

In addition to the bounce rate flatlining:

• Average Time on Site has gone up about 60%
• Average Page Views has more than doubled

And the number of visitors hasn’t changed.

Now this is a pretty remarkable result. I’m a big fan of using freelance graphic designers for web design, but to see the effect it could have on a mature website was quite extraordinary.

Nice work Ryan!

Bouncing the Bounce Rate – The Value of Good Design

Google Analytics Bounce Rate

When you track your website with Google Analytics, one of the figures you can see is Bounce Rate.

If a visitor comes to your website, views one page and then ‘bounces’ off elsewhere, that is called a bounce.

If 40 visitors out of every 100 only view one page before leaving, that is a 40% Bounce Rate.

You can view the bounce rate for your website overall, but you can also see it reported for individual items, such as by keyword or by page.

This is an extract from the Keywords view (with keywords removed) – you can see the bounce rate for each keyword in the right hand column.

Bounce Rate By Keyword

The bounce rate by keyword shows is which keywords are delivering the most qualified traffic.

If you look at the bounce rate by page, you can see which pages don’t engage interest and lead visitors in to the rest of your website.

What is the Bounce Rate in Google Analytics?