Today I’m doing a review of a new WordPress plugin called Zero Bounce.

Before I dive into the Zero Bounce review I want to quickly cover exactly what web masters are referring to when they talk about a sites ‘bounce rate’. A bounce is a site visitor that visits one page of your site and then leaves (bounces) to a new website. A common feature of a bounce, besides the fact that only ever visit one page on your site, is that a large portion of the visitors will bounce in under 30 seconds. Another common feature is that even a well made, easy to navigate, and informative site, will have a lot of their traffic be ‘bounce’ traffic.

Let me show you some of the stats from this very blog:

This graph shows the weekly traffic and the average bounce rate for this blog over the last several months. The dark blue line is the weekly traffic and the light blue line is the average bounce rate. The thing I want everyone to notice is that even though this blog has regularly increased in traffic the bounce rate has remained steady at just over 60%. That is each day 60% of my visitors come to my site, visit exactly one page and then leave. This is not a negative about my site as it is consistently increasing in popularity, its just a fact of the web, people are easily distracted.

Look at this numeric summery:

There are two important things to notice here. First the bounce rate, as I said over 60% (and honestly thats not super high in web terms) also notice that the bounce rate is much higher than the % of new sessions. While I would not mind the regulars bouncing, because that means that they just come to my site, read the latest review, and then leave, the cold hard fact is that every week this blog gets hundreds of new readers and on average 60% leave after only viewing a single page, with many of them leaving in just a few seconds. This quite simply is wasted traffic and a lost opportunity for me.

While these stats from Google analytic might lead you to think that there is something wrong with my blog that simply is not the case. One of the perks of being a web developer is that I have worked on hundreds of sites, most of which I did not own. I have seen a lot of analytic data and most sites have much worse stats than this. Its a harsh truth of running a website, people are fast paced and easily distracted online, on average 60% or more of your traffic will ‘bounce’ away. Much of that traffic will never return.

It does not take much thought to understand why webmasters have been trying to lower their bounce rate since the beginning. When people bounce away, especially if they do it quickly, you loose the chance to capture a lead, get a sale, or send them to an affiliate link. Basically a ‘bounce’ is worth nothing from a marketing and monetization stand point.

Reducing your bounce rate is the goal of Zero Bounce and it does it in a very simple way. It detects when a user clicks the browsers back button, captures that action and lets you redirect the user to any URL you like instead. This gives you a second change to engage that traffic before they are gone and likely lost forever. With more than 1/2 of your traffic bouncing away its not hard to see how having a second chance at capturing that traffic can be invaluable.

What I would suggest people do is use this to redirect your bounces to a squeeze page that offers them something niche / site related to opt into your email list. That way you ‘capture’ that visitor instead of loosing them.

I do want to make one disclosure. Though I rarely test the OTO / upsell on a launch in the case of Zero Bounce I did. Why? Because it adds functionality that I feel is important to have. While the normal version will let you redirect visitors that click the back button the pro (upsell) version that I tested will let you customize this functionality a whole lot more.

You can set up Zero Bounce to only redirect users who come from a specific site such as Google, Facebook or Bing. You can redirect users based on if they are on a mobile device or a desktop. You can set it to redirect a user if they try to close the browser (or if they type in a URL manually)  and you even set it to redirect only a specific percentage of your users.

The plugin is smart enough that it does not mistakenly redirect people who are browsing around your site and click the back button to go to a different page on your site or click a link in your site. But I did notice that there was no way to set the plugin to redirect people only once every X number of days. For example, if people come to my blog, try to bounce, but I redirect them to a squeeze page. They optin and end up on my list. A week later I send them a review email which they read and then try to leave again. I would not want to redirect them to the squeeze page again since they are already on my list.

I mentioned this to Ankur and at my suggestion he quickly had this feature added to Zero Bounce. Very cool.

Another thing to note is that the screen shot above shows the general ‘global’ settings. You can overwrite these settings on a ‘per post’ or ‘per page’ basis if you like. The plugin will allow you to turn it on or off on a per post / page basis and you can also set a post / page specific redirect URL if you choose.

The software itself was very easy to use. However if you need assistance it does have several ways to get help built right into the plugin.

Besides the very prominent link to the online docs on the lower right, there are also links to a FAQ section, a form to contact support, and even an area to suggest new features (something very few plugins have).

So what do I think of Zero Bounce over all? In my testing it worked well. I had no errors or issues with it. It was easy to set up, only taking a minute or two from install to finish. As a guy who spent a lot of time working online with websites and development I know for sure that bounce rates are always high, I cant remember the last time I saw a site with a rate of under 50% and normally they are much higher than that. Do you really want to let 50, 60 or even 70% of your traffic to slip through your fingers? I sure don’t! The one thing I will say though is if you pick this up grab take the OTO for the PRO version, the extra functionality and customization options are well worth the investment.

UPDATE: Zero Bounce is now in version 2.0 , this updated version offers additional features that the original version did not which allow you to control the bounces of external sites in addition to your WordPress site that you have this plugin on.

This is a extremely powerful new feature that makes a great plugin even better!

BONUS: I got Ankur to let me give away reseller rights to his WP Optin Boxes plugin. With this reseller account you not only get the plugin, but he will put you on 100% commissions so you can sell it yourself, using his sales page, and keep the entire sales price. Watch the WP Optin Boxes sales video below.

I put an access link right inside of JVZoo so you can get instant access to this bonus: Click here to get Zero Bounce and my special bonus!A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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