What Is A Bounce Rate?
In our social media strategy blog, we discussed how it is essential to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a quantifiable value that evaluates your progress in fulfilling your business objectives. Similarly, a bounce rate is a helpful metric to measure the success of your website.
This blog aims to help you learn more about bounce rate, how to measure it, and steps to achieve a healthy value.
What is a bounce rate?
A bounce rate is defined as a single-page session on your site. It is calculated as the percentage of visitors that leave your webpage without taking any action like clicking on a link, making a purchase, or filling out a form.
In other words, it is the number of visitors who “bounced” out of your landing page without interacting with any other features on your website.
Why is it important to measure my website’s bounce rate?
Increase business conversion rate
Obviously, visitors who bounced from your website did not convert. By understanding your bounce rate, you will learn to develop new ways to prevent visitors from bouncing. The more they interact with your website, the more likely they are to become customers.
Strengthen your website’s rank on Google
Bounce rates are known to influence a website’s Google Ranking. This makes sense as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in driving traffic to a website. As such, a good bounce rate (a low number) is a sign that your SEO techniques are paying off.
Identify areas for improvement
It is essential to analyze every aspect of your business, including your bounce rate. This is because you get to notice trends and prevent pitfalls in future endeavours. A high bounce rate will inform you which part of your website needs tweaking. For example, a better web design, faster loading page, or higher quality content is required.
How can I analyze my website’s bounce rate?
Google Analytics allows you to check your bounce rate any time you want. Simply go to your Google Analytics profile, then under “Audience,” click “Overview.” Here, you’ll get to access information on your website’s overall bounce rate, including the number of new users, the average duration of each session, the number of sessions per user, and your user’s demographic.
It is important to note that websites consist of multiple bounce rates, one for every page of the site. In addition, you should always consider the bounce rate of various devices. For example, the percentage of users who bounced off on mobile devices might be more than those who opened your page with a desktop computer.
Various factors might affect your bounce rate. As such, it is in your best interest to identify the root of the problem.
What affects my bounce rate?
There are many reasons visitors don't feel engaged and will bounce from your site. The key determinants of a bounce rate include:
Your target traffic
Who is your target audience, and what are they looking for in particular? Before your visitors start landing on your page, you want to know what their intent is. For example, are they researching for more information about your brand or are they likely to make an immediate purchase? This will help you design your landing pages to suit your visitor’s purpose, which will decrease the chances of them bouncing.
Where your traffic is generated
The source of your e-traffic can derive from various platforms. Are they entering through a link that you attached to your social media post? Or are they searching for the products or services that your offer on Google?
Visitors who found your website from their Google search results often bounce less as they are already interested in your business.
On the other hand, visitors from social media are 2-3 times more likely to bounce. As mentioned earlier, social induces high bounce rates because people want to see your content and then return to their browsing.
The type of landing page
There are multiple pages on your website that your visitors might land first — for example, your homepage, product or service page, contact page, or blog page, depending on the link they clicked to get there. You want to ensure that the landing page that greets your visitors makes a good impression of your brand and entices them to continue exploring your site. If the landing page is boring and does not offer much value, visitors are bound to bounce in an instant.
The design of your website
According to Stanford’s web credibility research, people judge your website’s visual design before your content. Websites that look old-fashioned can be a major turn-off for most users. You should always invest some time to revamp the design of your platform so that it is user-friendly. What is the theme of your layout? Are the fonts you picked readable? Did you include images or videos?
Not only will a good design look appealing, but it will also translate that your brand is fixated on quality. As a result, users are more convinced to trust your brand and make a purchase.
The loading speed of your website
It is self-explanatory that slow-loading pages entail a high bounce rate and low conversion rate. According to Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. Don’t let a simple technical issue sweep all your customers away!
The credibility of your website’s content
The best way to keep your visitors engaged with your website is to provide quality content. For example, does your blog page answer your visitor’s queries? Does your contact page allow visitors to write a direct message to your company? It is crucial to give what your visitors are looking for and more. Let’s be honest, people are busy and easily distracted. If they can’t find a clear answer, they will bounce to the following website on their search result list, or just give up and go watch cat videos on YouTube.
What’s a good bounce rate?
According to a report by SemRush, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is concerning.
This is a general rule of thumb. There are specific exclusions wherein a higher bounce rate is perfectly okay.
While a high bounce rate can be a sign that your content is not targeted to your visitor’s wants and needs, it can also be a positive indicator depending on the purpose of your page.
For example, your page intends to help visitors fix a faulty laundry machine. You provide detailed step-by-step instructions that are clear and easy to follow. There are even images or videos attached to simplify the learning process. Thanks to your webpage, visitors are able to fix their laundry machine and close the page.
Even though this counts as a single-page session and is considered a bounce, it is not because your webpage is poorly designed. In fact, it is the complete opposite. You were able to give visitors exactly what they needed. In such a scenario, you should be taking pride in a high bounce rate!
You can confirm this by checking your Google Analytics profile. It will show you the average duration that visitors spend on your website. If they lingered for a couple of minutes, you would know that they made use of your web info.
However, if the purpose of your webpage is to encourage users to engage with your platform as long as possible, or make a purchase, then you should worry about a high bounce rate.
Set your own goal
Improving your bounce rate can be tricky as it requires lots of experimentation and patience. Rather than pulling out your hair and wondering why you can’t keep up with the golden zone of 26 to 40 percent, you should set a realistic baseline first. In other words, you should plan a SMART goal. By doing so, you will have a clearer understanding of your progress and actually achieve results.
In addition, every website is unique and is targetted towards different types of audiences. As we’ve learned, sometimes, a high bounce rate can be a good indicator of the success of your webpage. You should not constantly be comparing the performance of your website with others, particularly those from an unrelated industry.
However, if you start seeing an upward trend, you might have to start analyzing your data and identify new ways to recover quickly.
FAQ
Are there any tools I can use to learn more about my website’s bounce rate?
Analyzing the trends of a website’s bounce rate can be frustrating, especially when there is zero real user data — how can we possibly know what’s going on?
Heatmap data is a fantastic way to learn the behaviours of your e-visitors as they interact with your page. It is by far the closest you can get to see how people use your page and why they are bouncing.
CrazyEgg and Hotjar are examples of heatmap tools that you can use. All you have to do is add a small piece of javascript to your site. Then the tool will automatically track how people read, click and scroll around your page.
What can I do to improve my bounce rate?
There are a million and one reasons for users to bounce from a website. However, there are simple tactics you can incorporate. For example, adding internal links to your content, appeal to your visitors with top-notch web-design, and start embedding YouTube videos on your page. Video hosting company Wistia found that adding videos to their pages more than doubled their average time on page.
By doing these, you can keep visitors stuck to your page like superglue.
What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions. A bounce occurs when a visitor enters the page and subsequently exits without visiting another page or interacting with any other features on the page.
On the other hand, an exit rate is the percentage of exits on a particular page. This is the number of people who exit your website after landing on a page and compares it to the total number of views the page received.
Both are equally essential metrics that will help you better understand your website’s strengths and weaknesses.
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