If you are a website owner or an online marketing consultant the chances are pretty high that you have heard about an online metric called “bounce rate”. It can be a great Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for any business if correctly understood.
It is important to realize that for many online businesess this metric is directly connected to their search engine rankings and their online success.
In this article I will explain about:
- What the bounce rate is and what not
- Industry benchmarks
- Factors that influence this metric
- Tips on how to analyze your bounce rate
- Tips on how to improve your bounce rate
The Definition of Bounce Rate
In the Web Analytics world not everyone interprets the bounce rate in the same way. Based on my experience I would calculate this metric as follows:
The number of single pageview visits to your website with no interaction / the total number of website visits * 100%.
Avinash Kaushik has a great definition for this: “They came, they puked and they left“.
Please note that the bounce rate is not the same thing as the exit rate.
The bounce rate is connected to the landing page of your website where the exit rate can be connected to any page on your website.
The exit rate is calculated by the number of exits on a certain page divided by the number of views of that particular page.
In this case it doesn’t matter whether your visitor left your website after seeing one, two or even more pages. It still counts as an exit.
One last thing to keep in mind about bounce rate vs exit rate:
- A bounce is always an exit
- An exit may be a bounce
This means that a page might have a bounce rate of 0%, but an exit rate of 100%. Hope this makes sense to you!
Great, now you have a good understanding of what the bounce rate is, let’s continue with standards in the industry.
Industry Benchmarks
Very often clients ask me whether their bounce rate is high or low and if I can come up with averages for their specific industry.
In my experience and based on industry research, I can say that the bounce rate varies enormously through different industries.
I will list a few categories here and indications of bounce rates that are considered ok:
- One page lead generation micro sites (60 – 90%)
- News / Media (40 – 60%)
- Content blogs (40 – 60%)
- Lead generation (35 – 50%)
- eCommerce (20 – 40%)
- Service (10 – 25%)
Please keep in mind that every website and situation is unique if you compare your bounce rate against industry averages.
Influential Factors
There are many different factors that influence the bounce rate of your website and individual pages. I have put together a list of eight factors that directly influence your bounce rate:
- The landing page design; does it fit your theme and expectations of site visitors?
- Pop-ups; are they functional or simply annoying?
- Ads on website; are they overly used or is it ok?
- Surveys; do you show them directly or on exit?
- Embedded videos; do they enhance the experience or heavily affect page load times?
- Relevancy of search ads; do they connect to the message on your website?
- Value; does your website show enough value to the visitors?
- Trust; do your website visitors feel at ease when landing on your website?
Judge yourself how you think about these points in relation to your website.
Tips on How to Analyze Your Bounce Rate Stats
Before providing you with tips on how to actually improve your bounce rate, I will first give your a few tips on how to analyze your bounce rate in more detail.
Benchmark Against Competitors
Very often website owners don’t look further than their own website data. If possible, it is tremendously valuable to put your own data into perspective.
Before knowing whether you are doing fine or definitely need to improve to keep up, I advise you to look at industry benchmarks or competitors in your field.
A great list of competitive intelligence data sources and tools that might come in handy:
The Definitive Guide To (8) Competitive Intelligence Data Sources.
Aggregate and Individual Level
It is ok if you take a look at the average bounce rate on your website, but if you really want to become an analysis ninja you have to dig deeper.
Take a look at:
- The bounce rate of your website
- The bounce rate of individual traffic sources
- The bounce rate of your keywords in different search engines
- The bounce rate of your most important landing pages
If you complete this list, you will find many clues for decreasing your bounce rate and lifting your conversion rate!
Tips on How to Improve Your Bounce Rate
Last but not least, I will provide you with a list of 10 tips to improve the bounce rate on your website and individual pages:
- Provide enough relevancy for your website visitors
- Reduce or even better get rid of pop-up ads
- Have clean, accessible navigation
- Include an internal site search field
- Have a responsive design
- Get your message immediately clear
- Improve your page load time
- Connect landing page and traffic source in the right way
- Don’t distract visitors with irrelevant messages
- Reduce the number of outbound links
This it it!
I hope that you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it!
If you put everything in practice I am 100% sure you will get greater results!
Thank you for your post! To improve your bounce rate, you can add :
– the content must not hinder the user from obtaining the information that they came to get on your site.
– the content must be associated with the information that the Internet user has come on to your site to look for.
You can read this post about the best pratices in Web analytics to respond to a high bounce rate : http://blog.atinternet.com/en/index.php/2013/03/26/best-practices/best-practices-in-web-analytics-to-respond-to-a-high-bounce-rate/1310
Thanks Paul for this detailed article on Bounce Rate. I’m writing an article on Bounce Rate, and for sure many of the points mentioned by you, would be a help for completing on my article topic; “Bounce Rate”
Hi Ranjan Jena,
Thank you for your comment and I am glad it helped you writing your article.
Best,
Paul