Bouncing rate

[Sar]

Only recently, we started analyzing our web traffic, and I was amazed how high bouncing rate we have. It is 68%, and majority of visitors leave site within first 10 seconds.

We have clean site, friendly navigation, good content, fast loading pages on dedicated server and forums with over 500.000 posts, but for some reason we didn't build very strong community yet. Let me add that we have very strong competitors on one of the smallest markets in the world. Site is focused on cosmetics, fashion and similar.

Share your advices how to lower this bouncing rate (besides good content). I have in mind firstly to remove one of the banners, leaving only one and maybe some promotion along with redesigning portal (maybe even with xenforo).

What do you do to keep visitors on page and keep them coming back?

 

[Carlos]

I have this same problem, and I am not understanding it - Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is coming out in just 2 weeks, and I see 58 - 100 keywords pointing to the site. The bounce rate is 58 percent compared to my vb4 instance that is a Modern Warfare 2 site at a whooping 70/80 percent.

Keep in mind, the MVC3 site in question is already on xenforo.

 

[cdub]

My bounce rate is at 78.65% - I don't get it. My new user rate is also 77.36%. I guess this means most new users are bouncing. Not good.

This is one of the reasons I want to change domains. It'll be more focused and my new domain will pertain more to the content of the site as the content has changed over the years organically.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

It'll be more focused and my new domain will pertain more to the content of the site as the content has changed over the years organically.

Bounce rates are normally high on forums, as you have little control over flooding a discussion with specific terms to keep high relevancy. When you allow people to input into a page / conversation, you take away page relevancy, unfortunately.