What is Bounce Rate?
“What is a bounce rate and should I be worried about it?”
Those are questions I have been asked many times. The first one is easier to answer than the second. Basically bounce rate is the rate of people that visited a page and left again without interacting with the page. So they didn’t click any links to other pages in your site. It doesn’t mean they didn’t read the page, just didn’t do anything further. This is known as a single page view.
“Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
Google’s Bounce Rate definition over at Google Analytics Help
So to get your bounce rate for a page Google Analytics will take the number of people who visited your home page for example divided by those with only single page views.
For example if 100 people visited your home page and 10 left without clicking any further then you have 100/10 = 10% bounce rate
So is Bounce Rate important?
Even though there are factors that may skew your bounce rate it is worth understanding your bounce rate, as it will help you understand your customers and how to better provide them with what they are looking for.
What is a good bounce rate
You are not going to get a 0% bounce rate but it is hard to know what is a good bounce rate. Here are some industry standard averages of bounce rates across difference types of websites and web pages that Google has learned to view as normal:
- Retail sites: 20-40% bounce rate
- Simple Landing pages: 70-90% bounce rate
- Portals: 10-30% bounce rate
- Service Sites: 10-30% bounce rate
- Content Sites: 40-60% bounce rate
- Lead Generation pages: 30-50%
Lowering your Bounce Rate
The good news is there a lots of things you can do to lower your bounce rate. Things like increasing page loading speed, having large and clear calls to actions and having relevant content are a few things that will help. But I’ll go into this in more detail at another articel
Infographic
Kissmetrics have provided a very usefull infographic that will help explain bounce rate. You can download the full pdf here.
