Bounce Rate – The Short & Sweet On How To Handle It In Business

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who arrive on a site and leave without vising a second page.

It is a ratio calculated from single page visits divided by entry pages.

Bounce Rate = Single Page Visits/Entry Pages

What Is The Difference In The Bounce Rate & Exit Rate?

Bounce Rate applies only to a visit entry/landing page, or the first page a person visits. Exit rate applies to the page a visit exit or leaves on. Exit rate applies to identifying where people exit mid-stream from the conversion funnel.

Why Is Bounce Rate Important?

Bounce Rate can show you, as a business owner and marketer where you are failing to meet the consumer’s expectations at the initial entry into a site. Or, where you are excelling to meet a visitor’s expectations at the entry into a site.  This analytics metric can show a site designer where there is room for improvement, where there is room for better business, or where site design is excelling and meeting expectation of the visitor for future design decisions.

There Are Four Common Bounce Rate Scenarios:

1. Clicking the Back Button
2. Closing the browser window or tab
3. Typing a new URL
4. Session timing out after 30 min

By asking the correct questions about web analytics, better business decisions can be made.

For example, why is my bounce rate so high?

Simple answer, because visitors are coming and leaving your website before completing any actions or goals. But, that simple answer, leads to an in-depth investigation and discussion.

Why are these people leaving? What is my landing page not giving users that they want? What exactly are they looking for? If you can answer these questions through investigation and testing, you can raise your conversion rate and in turn generate new or repeat business.

What Is A Good Bounce Rate, Though?

This is a loaded, but frequently asked question. According to Google, the average bounce rate is 40%. But, this is essentially a meaningful metric. A good bounce rate varies by industry, brand, type of site, page type, user intent, and many other factors.

Google Analytics Benchmark Average Bounce Rates:

• 40-60% Content Websites
• 30-50% Lead Generation Sites
• 70-98% Blogs
• 20-40% Retail Sites
• 10-30% Service Sites
• 70-90% Landing Pages 

Why Are Some Bounce Rates High and Some Low?

Like mentioned above, there are many different factors that affect a bounce rate. Notice the average Bounce Rate for a blog is 70-98%, this is because most blogs have their most recent content on their home page, or where the visitor is entering the site. Therefore, there is no reason for the user to navigate to different pages, the answers they are looking for are right there. If your business is operating a retail site and a high Bounce Rate is being generated from a product landing page or checkout page, a red flag should be raised to investigate why the visitor’s expectations are not being met.

Where Should Businesses Analyze Their Bounce Rate In Web Analytics?

Initially, the Bounce Rate can be seen in the “Pages” report, but is this always the best place to check? No, be aware this report causes the Bounce Rate to lose context because the entrance metric is lacking. In this scenario, utilize the “Landing Pages” report because it is relative to the number of entrances. Or, to be perfectly precise, build a custom report.

In short, the Bounce Rate was designed to determine if the right audience is coming to pages, and if the pages are meeting visitor expectations.