Google Analytics can be confusing to the untrained eye, however the majority of it is all very straight forward once you get the hang of the terminology and data available. One of the most common stumbling blocks is understanding what Bounce Rate means, as it’s reported widely throughout Google Analytics. This post will take you through what Bounce Rate is, what is a good bounce rate and how to improve your bounce rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate is calculated from the bounces that a page receives; but what is a bounce? Well, visually it’s nice and easy to understand – imagine a ball hitting your website (representing a visitor entering your site), if the user then visits another page the ball is absorbed, but if the user leaves your site, the ball bounces. So a bounce is when a visitor enters and exits your site via only one page.
The bounce rate is purely calculated from the number of entrances to the site for each page, rather than people visiting that page having already seen a page of your site within the same visit. If a visitor has already seen another page of your site before exiting this is counted towards the exit rate rather than the bounce rate.
So if 100 people enter this website on this page and 40 click through to another page, the bounce rate is 60% as 60 out of the 100 exited straight after entering. Will you be a bounce or will you stick?
What is a Normal Bounce Rate?
So now you know what a bounce rate is, how do you know if yours is good or more people are bouncing than should be?
Bounce rates differ depending on the content of the page, for example:
A holding page for a site that has no links to other pages on the same domain would have a 100% bounce rate as every visitor would have to exit once they have entered the page.
Blog posts usually have a high bounce rate due to the whole post being on one page and many visitors entering the site only wanting to read that article.
Product pages on online stores tends to have a low bounce rate as users are browsing different products and will be actively looking around the site.
How to Analyse Bounce Rates
Depending on your website and sector, an average bounce rate is usually around 40% – 50%, over 50% is seen as high and under 40% is very good. However as with any data, it is always essential to look at other contributing factors and parallel data to ensure you are getting the full picture and the most out of the statistics.
One very good comparison for bounce rate is the average time on the page. This figure can sometimes be slightly skewed within Google Analytics but if you take it as general guideline you can save yourself some worry about a high bounce rate; for example, if you see that the time on page is several minutes this shows that users are getting a lot from the one page before leaving. If, however, the time on page is very low and the bounce rate is very high you can conclude that it is not taking users very long to decide that they don’t want to spend any more time on your site, this is something that will often need addressing.
A good place to analyse bounce rates more thoroughly is within Top Landing Pages report under Content in Google Analytics. This shows you how many entrances, the number of bounces and the bounce rate as a percentage.
The Importance of Understanding Your Bounce Rate
So now that you know what bounce rate is and how to analyse it you may be wondering why it’s good to understand it and how this can be of use to you. Here are five quick advantages you can get from understanding your websites bounce rate:
- Improve content on pages with high bounce rate
- Identify if there is a strong need for a redesign
- See which type of pages hold users on the site best and create similar
- See if a particular marketing source (such as PPC) has an inflated bounce rate and adjust your marketing accordingly
- See if the organic keywords sending traffic are the right ones for your site or if you are ranking for keywords that don’t hold visitors
Got any questions? Leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you, or if you need help measuring the success of your website feel free to give us a call to find out about our website analytics services.
What is Bounce Rate by Koozai on YouTube.
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Image Source
Bouncing balls via BigStock
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Bounce rate is very big factor, In my thinking, but many just don’t look towards factors like this, which can hugely effect a website. A very high Bounce rate means, Visitors are not getting what they want (not always, but in most cases) and are leaving website to find more content, which also be called as Pogo sticking, if those visitors click on other search results in Google. Indirectly, We may lose our authority as Google will consider our content as worthless and will take down rankings. So, Bounce rate has lot do, no matter, which niche we are working on, from Blogging to eCommerce, this factors needs to be focused on, if we are really looking to provide good user experience.
Hey :) That’s a great article you’ve got here, I like it! If you have some spare time, check out the undermentioned blog entry – it may interest you!
I’m new to the blogging world and I only have 1 page with only 2 posts so far. My bounce rate is 76% . What do you think that means? I am learning as I go and would love some feedback/suggestions.
I have a high bounce rate- 85% and it appears they stay on for 1.50 minutes, which I assume is not great. Does GA differentiate though between legitimate and spam users? I tend to get a lot of spammers coming through blog post comments.
I am in the process of making changes to my Website and rewriting some content pages but wondering if needs complete overhaul. I operate a nutrition consulting business and went the Website route instead of a WP blog although there are pros and cons.
Interested in your thoughts.
Hi Christine. The bounce rate could be lower, but the fact you are seeing lots of spam comments makes the bounce rate and time on page look like this is happening. They are only viewing that one page (so once finished on the page they will likely leave, causing a bounce) and they are spending around 2 minutes scanning the article and writing a comment.
The time on page is not too bad. And it may be the case the legitimate users are reading the content and leaving your site satisfied. I would set yourself a goal of trying convert readers but putting in Call to Actions on your posts. This could be a contact us or related articles. Focus on what the genuine user might want. I notice that you have sponsored blog post articles at the bottom of each of your posts. Users clicking these would trigger a bounce because they haven’t gone on to another page of your website, so perhaps remove these if adding other Call to Actions.
Google Analytics wont be able to tell you who is spam and who is real, but you can use reports like the location report to see if there the bouncing visitors are all coming from one place. You may wish to remove the blog commenting option form your site.
Very well said… :)
Anna ! Your post is awesome (Y)
Now i get to know ,what is bounce rate and what’s it importance.Here my research ends about bounce rate ,Thanks a lot to the author to share such an important article on bounce rate .Feeling fortunate to being here .
After reading ur post, I have got an idea about bounce rate, thank you Anna..
thank you..
i needed someone to put together some concise information to explain some of those mysteries. This is extremely helpfulThanks for the description about bounce rate, very happy to read it!
What reason could you give for a good Bounce Rate (40.33%), 5.65 pages/visit and a visit duration of 3 mins 13 secs.
Our e-commerce site is 1 month old, our website was launched approx 18 months ago and we are targeting to sectors for google ad words from last monday Garden hoses and Garden Furniture.
We have had one genuine sale in this month.
Any help would be appreciated.
Regards
This was a very useful article for me, a neophyte.
This sentence said it all for me “a bounce is when a visitor enters and exits your site via only one page.”
Your cautions about how to interpret bounce rate were useful as well.Great Video thanks for sharing i understood more about bounce rate.
Gracias por la clara explicación Anna!
Well explained! Lost of good info on this site btw.
Finally a clear explanation of what bounce rate means!
Some pages on our website have a low bounce rate and are less than a minute is sepct on the page. What does that mean?
Thank you
Thanks for your easy to understand explanation!
Great article Anna, thank you.
Can you please confirm whether this situation I’m about to explain is a bounce please. Our organisation got wide-reaching publicity on national radio about something we were offering for free and our form wasn’t working. I suspect the form/database couldn’t cope with multiple orders simulaneosly and the data got restricted by a bottleneck. We know the form wasn’t working because people started commenting on social media that they couldn’t submit their order because the form wasn’t working.
Would this be bounce? ie. if the visitor filled in all the fields on that form, then hit the submit button, but the data won’t submit, they leave the page/site. I suspect yes, but I would appreciate your opinion given your knowledge and expertise. Thank you very much.
Thank you for a well written article. I was getting slightly confused about the definition and was reading into it too much.
I had a massive increase in visits but with 100% bounce rate. It was only recently that I realised I was doing some browser tests – hence the bounce rates!
I was wondering why my bounce rate was mostly 0%. Thanks for explaining this!
Thanks for this post! I have a new site and have been really keeping track of the analytics. My bounce rate is kind of high, 47% however the average time on page is 4 minutes witch I think is pretty good.
I wouldn’t have known about the time on page part if I hadn’t seen this post. So thanks again Anna!
Very useful article. Thank you Anna.
This article was extremely helpful – thank you!
Thank you for this helpful post, I check my Google analytics often and never really understood most of it. Very nice.
Excellent post, your explanation between bounce and exit was very easy to understand. Will be looking forward to next weeks post. Cheers
Thank you for your clear explanation!
Aida
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