Going online and making a website effective the way a developer wants to is not always a cakewalk. Many developers do not know which metrics to look at to ensure site performance. This is because there are so many to look at. Among the Google Analytics metrics out there, ‘bounce rate’ is one such metric that tells you a lot of things to help improve the performance of your web site. This post explains how you can make use of the bounce rate metric to improve site performance.
Looking At Bounce Rate
Wikipedia defines bounce rate as: the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.
The formula used to calculate the bounce rate of a website:
Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits to that Page
Rating Bounce Rates
Bounce rates vary in different industries. While some industries may typically offer a better bounce rate than others, what I have done below is tried to give a guideline for websites as a whole as to what is an acceptable bounce rate.
Awful – 80%-100% – Less than 3% of our sites measured have an average bounce rate this poor. Time to rethink your online strategy. Very rare to see a site that performs this poorly unless its strictly an informational site.
Bad – 55% to 80% – Surprisingly, we see that 25% of sites fall within this range in the first few months that we measure. This metric is improved by introducing A/B and split testing for site improvement.
Average – 40% – 55% - Most sites we measure, about 45% fall within this range. If you are here you can likely be making significant improvements using Website Optimizer.
Good – 26% – 40% – 20% of sites that we measure fall within this range. If your bounce rate is in this range you are doing very well. There are still improvements that can be made though so keep measuring!
Very Good – 0% – 25% – Less than 6% of the sites we measure have a bounce rate this low. If you have metrics this good you are doing something very right!
According to Google Analytics Guru Avinash Kausik “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying”.
Low/Good bounce rate indicates that visitor engagement on your site is good. High/Bad ratings is a bad situation and improvement plans should be made.
A high bounce rate indicates that your websites entry or doorway page (landing pages/ entrance pages) are not speaking to the audience properly. Some user distracting elements may be found.
Here Are Some Quick Tips To Improve Bounce Rate
Possible reasons for high bounce rate
Landing pages not relevant to visitors: The page doesn’t have the data visitors are looking for. In this case, your bounce rate will be high. The more compelling your landing page the higher will be your conversions.
Page load time is too high: Avoid using heavy page loading factors like ‘skip intro’ or flashy banners. When you’re using third party data for accessing content make sure it gets loaded fast.
Visitors might have landed using a poorly placed keyword: Sometimes your site gets listed for a keyword that doesn't apply or your PPC campaign is pointing to a bad page. You can check these factors with analytics ‘keywords’ option to find out which keywords return poor visits.
Lack of conversion link or poor navigation: Another large aspect is lack of proper navigation on the entrance page. Visitors will leave the page within seconds to other URLs.
Improper sales message: A bounce rate will be higher if your sales message does not comply with the services you offer. We advise not to offer misleading messages like ‘no fees for our services’ if this is not true. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
Here Are Some Further Resources To Improve Bounce Rates
Sales Funnel Development - Learn about the importance of a call to action in your top banner.
Landing Page Optimization – Tips for a better landing page.
Want to figure out how your site is doing? That is what us Analytics guru's are here for!
Wonderful intro Asha!
Just worth highlighting a couple of points.
1) is that an acceptable bounce is when a customer is just trying to locate a phone number, this stresses the importance of phone call tracking, or perhaps placing a phone number on an inside page. The medical profession tend to have an (acceptably) higher bounce rate than other vertical markets.
2) is that (as Avinash recommends) it is worth examining multiple metrics when building a picture of what is going on. Segment to see whether a bounce is keyword/traffic source or content related and address accordingly. If its PPC, then address immediately, if its organic then check your optimization is correctly focused on relevant keywords.
Jon
Thanks for the great post Asha. The tips to reduce bounce rates helps us to improve conversions. This post reminds us that bounce rate is like feedback from site visitors and cannot be ignored.
This was a really nice write up on bounce rate interpretation. Really an educative post.
Higher bounce rate is a cause of worry for every website owner. So what you're trying to say is if any website page with a bounce rate of higher than 45% should be looked at very closely, right?
Another possible reason of bounce rate variation could be resulted from technical errors within your site, that time you will be experiencing either high or low bounce rate figures.
Very interesting piece of information on how to measure your analytics. Especially the quick tips that you have provided with. One question – is there a standard to measure the Analytics like you have mentioned "Bad is between 55% to 80%"; so what is the measurement standard? Could you please englighten?
I was not aware that heavy page loading factors would increase bounce rate. Now I understand that the skip intro of my site could be the reason why the bounce rate of my website is increasing. Thanks for the tips.
Nice post Asha. This is one of the major technique to measure our sites performance. I was not aware of this bounce rate being so important. This gave me an entire picture of bounce rates and how they vary.