What is Bounce Rate?

Hi, I’m Anna, and I’m a search specialist at Koozai. I’m here to talk to you about bounce rate. What it is, why you need to know about it, and what you can do to improve it. This video is going to be beneficial for anybody involved in the website, including web developers, SEO, PPC, email marketing, copywriting, and conversion rate optimization.

So, what is bounce rate? Here are two users, and here is your website. The first user comes along to your site, they didn’t like it. They left straight away. The second user visits a page of your site. They have a look at another page. That means they’ve stuck. They’ve not bounced from your site.

So here we have two users, one bounced, one stuck. This means you’ve got a 50% bounce rate. What’s a normal bounce rate? Well, actually over 50% is probably a bit high. But anything under 50% is okay. Under 40%, you’re doing well.

But different pages have different bounce rates. So, a blog page, people might find it via social media. So they’ll click a Twitter link, come to the page, they won’t be interested in any of your other blog pages necessarily at that moment in time. They only want to read that post. So they are likely to have a much higher bounce rate than another page of normal content.

Now, one example of this is a product page on an e-commerce site. If somebody does an organic search for it, clicks the result, they see a product. Well, it might not be the right product. They might want to compare to other products. So what they’ll do is they’ll click. So you get a low bounce rate on product pages of an e-commerce site.

So, what else can you do with bounce rate statistics? It’s good to compare it to the average time on site. If the user who bounces has spent five minutes on the site before leaving, you’re doing quite well. Whereas a user has come to your page and after only two seconds, they’ve gone on to another page, you know that actually, even though you’ve got a low bounce rate, with the average time on page being very low, it may not be the right page.

So you could adjust your PPC campaign. You could promote a different page organically. You could pick a different link for your email marketing campaign once you know what your bounce rate is and what the average time on page is.

So, how can you improve your bounce rate? Well, there are several different things. With a product page, it would be good to have a list of related products, so that somebody can easily see what other products are available and which other pages they should go to.

You can also use a breadcrumb that easily shows the category in which that product was so that somebody can just go up a level in the site and see all the options available.

When you’ve got a blog post, if you want other people to read other pages of your site, it’s a good idea to add related blog post links, categories, maybe a link to the writer’s Twitter profile. Those sort of things mean that actually your user will interact a bit more with your site. Obviously, if they click a Twitter link, that would take them off the site and your bounce rate would still be high. But actually, they’re going somewhere beneficial. So sometimes it’s good.

So, hopefully, that explains to you what bounce rate is. If you need any more information, I’ve written a blog post on it as well. You can see that on the Koozai.com blog. We’re also on Facebook and YouTube, so give us a like. Thanks