What is the bounce rate
- 6 October 2021
What is the bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave (i.e., bounce) rather than continuing on to view other pages within that same site. Bounce rate is most often used as an indicator of the effectiveness of a given web page, blog post, or advertisement by evaluating how strong the relationship between the visitor and that particular page is.
If the bounce rate is high, that means visitors are not engaging with the post and vice versa. When people want to achieve higher conversions on their site, they will often review their content marketing strategy. This basically looks at things like what kind of content you are posting, how often you are posting, how effective it is, what your bounce rate is, etc.
How bounce rate is calculated?
Bounce rate is calculated by Google Analytics and reported under Site Content > All Pages. This metric represents the percentage of visits that consist of a single pageview, i.e., where the person left your site from that landing page without viewing any other pages.
The bounce rate is one of many great tools in Google Analytics to show you how engaged your website visitors are with the site. Low bounce rates tell you that most people view more than one page on your site which tells you that they are interested in what you have to offer, i.e., they read the content and then click on something else.
Essentially, a high bounce rate is bad for your business because it means web traffic is moving on after only viewing the one page, e.g., they didn't even look at your home page or any other pages that you wanted them to see before leaving. They just left and this makes you lose a potential customer with a single click of a button.
A bounce rate can be displayed as a percentage of visits, e.g., 58% of visitors bounced or as a percentage of page views, e.g., 20% of pages are bounced, but they mean the same thing.
What is the difference between Bounce Rate and Exit Rate?
Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate – A simple definition says that bounce rate is based on one-page view only, while exit rate uses the number of visits (pages viewed). If a user has visited more than one page during their visit, then the bounce rate will not reflect that visit. Exit rate, however, will count each page view in the numerator of the calculation, thus giving it a larger value than bounce rate when comparing conversion rates across site pages.
Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate – An even better explanation says that "bounce rate" reflects users who have visited only one page during their stay on a site while "exit rate" reflects users who have visited only one page of a site before leaving it. This means that when bounce rate is high, it doesn't necessarily mean that the website has poor content or navigation; rather it could be caused by several factors such as:
1) If the user came to the site for research purposes and doesn't intend to buy.
2) If the landing page has poor quality (flash, etc.).
3) Low-quality site's architecture which leads to bad user experience.
4) Low-quality content on the page.
5) The lack of calls to action.
6) Page was not found (404).
7) The user came from a search engine and does not have a specific goal.
8) If it is a gateway page that leads to another site, then the bounce rate will be 100%.
Exit Rate – The percentage of visits that exited at a particular page or group of pages (see also Flow). It can be calculated as the number of visits that exited on a particular page or group of pages within a specified time frame divided by the total number of visits for that time period.
-Source: Google Analytics Help Exit Rate metric
For example, if you have 100 unique visitors and your bounce rate is 50%, it means you had 50 visitors who only visited one page and 50 visitors who visited 2 or more pages.
If you have 200 unique visitors and your bounce rate is 50%, it means you had 100 visitors who only visited one page and 100 visitors who visited 2 or more pages.
If you have 1000 unique visitors and your bounce rate is 30%, it means that 300 unique users only visited 1 page, 600 unique users visited 2 or more pages and 100 visitors did not visit any page.
If you have 1000 unique visitors and your bounce rate is 50%, it means that 500 unique users only visited 1 page, 500 unique users visited 2 or more pages and 0 visitors did not visit any page.
--- Read More! WHAT IS ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING? ---
What is a good bounce rate?
Bounce rate is among the most popular metrics of online performance, and as such it gets a lot of attention. However, bounce rate is misused by marketers and clients alike to mean different things in different contexts. This confuses web analysts and hurts our credibility because we lack clear messaging on what analytics can and cannot do. To fix that, we need to do some data journalism.
In order to set the record straight, I'll walk through the various definitions of bounce rate and describe what each one means in terms of your web analytics tools. In a nutshell:
· Bounce rate is not a direct funnel metric. It's technically impossible for an analytics tool to directly determine if a single session resulted in a conversion event because attribution modelling is still an unsolved problem. These leaves open the possibility that the last click or interaction with your site could have been a referrer from another website or offline channel. So, remember, bounces are always sessions!
· The bounce rate that matters most is the revenue-based bounce rate, which includes only sessions that ended with a conversion event. This bounce rate is the most actionable and tells you if your site is working for customers or not. Your revenue-based bounce rate (including leads and transactions) should be no more than 2%.
· The conversion funnels your organization chose to implement in Google Analytics/AdWords/etc. are great ways to measure their own performance. However, they do not necessarily represent customer behaviour on your website because the funnel reports lack a fourth dimension (time). They're like heat maps of clicks, but without any information about where visitors came from or how long they stayed.
· A click map is an especially poor way to measure engagement because it only shows raw interest in specific elements of your page. It, therefore, offers no information about the end destination of a user after they've clicked on one part of your site.
· The single-page checkout funnel does accurately measure engagement between steps, but cannot tell if any given step is causing customers to drop off. To do that, you'd need to implement an event tracking script on each step and run statistical significance tests to determine which are actually causing attrition. This takes significant development effort, so I don't recommend it unless you have direct insight into how users are abandoning your processor time to play around with Google Analytics Premium reports.
So, let's start by clearing up what analytics tools can't do:
Bounces are sessions, not visitors. It's possible for someone who started a session on your site to complete a single page out of curiosity and then leaves it in the middle of it.
How to reduce bounce rate?
You've spent some time and money with SEO, you created a perfect website with interesting content (that is search engine friendly), now it's time to check how your online marketing campaign is going. It's important to monitor the traffic that comes to your website, bounce rate being just one of them.
What is the bounce rate? Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who enter on a webpage and exit from the same webpage without exploring other pages within the site. That means some people are coming all the way to your page, but they don't want to stay there. Their interest in you (brand or product) may be completely gone after reading one paragraph on your blog or after viewing one specific page on your site. You can reduce bounce rates by adding more unique content (such as video tutorials, infographics etc), improving navigation structure, enhancing web usability and many more simple steps.
Our primary goal with every website that we develop is to create a good online experience, meaning visitors don't have to think about leaving your site. There are several techniques you can use in order to accomplish this, simply follow the tips below:
Improve web design
When it comes to web design sometimes less is more. People love simplicity, especially when they visit websites. That's why simple and clean designs are popular among users. Try using negative space (white spaces) on your page in order to improve the user experience on your website. You should also pay attention to font selection, font size and so on if you want your visitors not to get irritated by seeing all of these while visiting your page.
Increase content quality
As stated before, the website bounce rate rises when the quality of your content is not up to par. If you want users to have a pleasant experience on your site, try going for informative and interesting content that has a certain purpose instead of useless information or writing fluff articles.
Improve user navigation
Navigation structure can also affect the bounce rate on your website. The more organized it is, the lower your bounce rate will be. Visitors should have no difficulties finding what they are searching for within seconds of visiting your page. Web usability is another important thing you should keep in mind (and we're speaking about menus and submenus, how pages link with each other etc.)
No matter if you're running an eCommerce store or a blog, reducing bounce rate is probably one of the top priorities on your list. Make sure you are doing all in your power to improve the user experience when visiting your website, that will have a positive impact on the overall bounce rate which means more satisfied users who are not leaving your page before achieving what they came for.
