70% leaving the first page

I see in google analytics, that 70% are leaving the first page (where they enter).
How much is it in your forum?
And what have you done to change this?

Thanks!
Marcel

The bounce rate on my Forum has been about 40%.
It was about ~50% about 3-4 months back.

Maybe it can be attributed to the style changes I did in the existing skin.

Marcel - I think you simply need to improve your template. You should consider getting more interesting header/logo done. Also find ways to highlight particular content as soon as they arrive on the page, so that you don't lose them.

I think you will see at least a small %-age improvement just by increasing the aesthetics of your logo/header. You definitely don't want to lose 70% of your traffic that easily.

Improve your main landing page and it will help that immensely. My bounce rate was at over 80% when we first launched, and since i've ditched vbaCMPS, made some template changes to most pages, improved naviation, and that number is now dropping under 50%.

my site was at 85% when i took it over! stale content and a tired design, coupled with some dead links and features that didn't work right seemed at fault.

with my redesign, i'm running 35-40% currently. although my adsense is down (like most peoples), so i'm thinking it was a mixed blessing dropping the bounce rate. ha!

Mine currently is pretty high also. I've been trying to figure out why it is so high lately. I've even added things to the header and cleaned things up a lot.

Thanks a lot for your answers.

my bounce is around 60% too.

I think you'll find that when you have linked topics, your bouce rate will go up. People will click-in from the other site to see what everyone is talking about, then close out and return to where they were before.

Is it possible to see, if they entered and left on the front side or within a thread?
That's important for me to know, if I have to optimize my home first. But I think (but don't really know), they're coming from search engines and enter the threads directly.
And then I have to optimize some other things.
Do they see, that there is a navbar at the top where they can click and go to other parts? Or do they end at the footer of the page, meaning they have to close the window because there is nothing else?

Let's have a look at it:
www.symptome.ch
Any comments what you think regarding this point?

Thanks a lot!

Marcel

have you signed up for and installed google analytics there are tons of tools and more then enough information to help optimize your forums

Analytics will help you determine pages that are bleeding traffic.

Also there is a service out there that does a "heat map" on where users are clicking, etc., on your site. I forget the name. Has anyone used this service? Name? Feedback?

Here's some info. It's called crazyegg:
http://www.techcrunch.com/13/see-wha...ith-crazy-egg/

My bounce rate is around 90%, most people leaving via adsense or getting what they want from the first page after coming from SERPs. My homepage doesn't see much traffic at all and that's fine by me.

It could be interesting to compare bounce rates with earnings per 1,000 visitors.

Do high bounce rates result in higher CTRs, greater revenue density per visitor? Is there some optimum bounce rate that seems to allow for greatest "revenue traffic density"?

I suppose I shouldn't be confusing anyone with new terms. I was referring to:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/ecpm-wha...y-is-that.html