What Is A Website Bounce Rate?
A site’s bounce rate is a key piece of information it tells you how well people are or not engaging with a webpage’s content or user experience. A major league tool, that most of the internet websites use to determine bounce rates is called Google Analytics .
The frustrating part about these raw numbers is that it also can be a deceiving piece of information. Why deceiving, because while analytics log an access to your site, you have to figure out who area real people and who are bots cruising the web. So how do you find out what is the true rate? Let’s define first what a bounce rate is.
WHAT IS A BOUNCE RATE?
Bounce rate is calculated when a human or bot, visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving the same page. The goal of any site, is to interest a human into performing another action such as buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
WHAT IS BOT TRAFFIC?
Bot traffic is defined as any non-human traffic that connects to your website or app. Often “bots” are associated with all things negative, as they tend to be irritating due to their irrelevance in terms of user engagement.
However, bots aren’t necessarily good or bad. It all depends on their purpose. Some bots are designed to be useful to users. Others can be rather malignant, such as the ones designed for data scraping, launching denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, malware installation or other unauthorized web crawling.
What makes these bots such a nuisance is that they can mess with your website analytics and they typically generate click-fraud. A action which defrauds services like Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager, and the programmatic advertising world.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
To define what a good bounce rate is, you need to understand the difference between a high bounce rate and a low bounce rate. A high bounce rate means that a visitor’s overall session duration is short; they visit a page on your site and leave. A low bounce rate means that visitors are spending time on a page and clicking on available links.
- A high bounce rate means that a visitor’s overall session duration is short
- A low bounce rate means that visitors are spending time on a page and clicking on available links.
Another way to think about this is to think about a site’s structure. Let’s consider an ecommerce site. The homepage might have the highest bounce rate out of any page, for instance, because you want your visitors to stay on landing pages where they can make a purchase, like a product page.
So, what is a good bounce rate?
If you have done the work of protecting against Bots hitting your site, a bounce rate of 60% to 70% is on the high side. Some work may be necessary to drop this, in the Uix, loading speed, hosting response or similar website performance issues.
Average bounce rates range in the 41% to 55%, where an optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.
These are general ranges of evaluation and highly dependent on the popularity your site has with the bots.
Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate
When discussing bounce rates, another term that frequently comes up is the exit rate. The difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate is sometimes not well understood since the two are rather similar.
If the bounce rate is the number of single-engagement sessions a webpage has, the exit rate is the number of people departing a specific page, even if they didn’t originally land on it.
As an example:
If a person lands on page 1 of your site and hits their browser’s back button to the referring page, that’s a bounce. But if they land on page 1, go to page 2, and then quit their browser or jump to another site, that’s considered an exit. Because they clicked to another page from page 1, that can not be considered a bounce. Neither can page 2 since that’s not the first page the person landed on.
How to Lower Bounce Rates
If you want to lower your bounce rate, you should consider what can negatively impact your bounce rate, including:
- Slow page loading speed
- Pop-ups over the primary page
- Unnecessary plug-ins loading the page.
- Poor usability via the Uix
- Title tags and meta descriptions that aren’t properly optimized
- Technical errors
- Missing Pages
- No SSL
- Dull content
- Pages that aren’t mobile or tablet friendly aka responsive.
- Improperly implemented Google Analytics setup
WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?
Optimize for Mobile/Tablet
There is a rising number of people using their smart phones as their primary internet viewing device. Having a good design, that is responsive is essential.
Make your page easy to read
It is an international market. While English may be the primary language of the net, the viewers may not be as versed. It is recommended by Yoast, the leading SEO plugin/extension provider, that you follow the Flesch reading ease score. This may be frustrating to some business owners, as the read level is the equivalent of a 4th grade education.
Target High-Value Traffic Keywords
A keyword isn’t just a keyword. Some have higher values than others. These keywords can vary according to the part of the sales funnel you’re sitting in — driving traffic and establishing authority or seeking to convert buyers whose interest you have hooked. If you choose a keyword that drives traffic to your site, you must deliver on its promise with the right content
Use SEO
Effective competitive research, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, or on-page and technical SEO, are the solutions you need. The results will provide new ideas for content, backlinks, strategy, UX, and much more. By implementing them, you can change higher bounce rates into jumps for joy as you get more successful visitor engagement.
Debbie Kurth
CEO & Technical Director of Multimedia Designs, LLC, System Designer, Developer, Producer with 15+ years in the internet design and development space and 25+ years in the Software Development for the entertainment industry. Winner of the prestigious International Themed Entertainment Association award for interactive design. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering & Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach.
