What is the bounce rate?
The percentage of website visits that are one-page sessions, with the visitor leaving without viewing a second page, is known as the bounce rate. It is frequently employed as a gauge of a website’s overall level of engagement.
How is the bounce rate determined?
The total number of single-page visits divided by the total number of website entries yields the bounce rate. For instance, if a website’s homepage receives 2,000 visitors in a month and 500 of those visitors leave the site after viewing the homepage but don’t visit any other pages, the homepage’s bounce rate is 25%.
Exit rate versus bounce rate
Although bounce rate and exit rate are both used as proxies for website engagement, they differ slightly from one another. The bounce rate counts the number of visitors who land on a website but then leave without exploring any other pages. The number of users who leave a website from a particular page is measured by the exit rate.
The main difference between the two is that the exit rate quantifies the proportion of users who left a specific page, but it says nothing about whether or not that user visited any other pages. Therefore, all exits and one-page visits are bounces, but not all bounces are exits.
The homepage’s bounce rate, for instance, would be 50% if 100 visitors arrived and 50 of them left without viewing any other pages. However, during that same time frame, the homepage might receive 400 pageviews, but only 100 of those visitors might leave the website from the home page. In that situation, 25% of people would leave.
What should be the perfect bounce rate?
No such thing as a “standard” bounce rate. Given the enormous variety of website types and industries that target a huge and diverse audience, it is difficult to generalize this metric, which accounts for more than four billion pages on the Internet.
Based on the type of page and the traffic source, a “good” bounce rate is also a relative term. For instance, the bounce rate of a page that contains an informative article that provides an answer to a particular question and receives the majority of its traffic from organic search could be as high as 90%.
Even though the page has a high bounce rate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has a “bad bounce rate.” It could simply mean that the user found what they were looking for and no longer needed to view any other pages. On the other hand, a page with a low bounce rate might not be considered “good” if the user experience is subpar.
A rough benchmark of bounce rates by an industry that displays the typical bounce rate for various site types has been compiled by HubSpot. Take these figures with a grain of salt, but they might serve as a general benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of your pages.
Typical bounce rates are –
- 40–60% for websites with content.
- 30% to 50% for websites that generate leads.
- 70% to 90% of blog entries.
- 20% to 40% for websites for online shopping.
- 10–30% for services websites.
- 65% to 90% for landing pages.
How can bounce rates be lowered?
You should review your web analytics to determine where changes are most necessary before taking any actions to lower your bounce rate. Having said that, the following are instances of practical fixes for pages with high bounce rates:
Google Analytics
Refining the measurement method is one way to lower bounce rates. Even if a user spends a lot of time on a page and interacts with the items on the page, analytics software like Google Analytics will still classify that user as a “bounce” if they leave the site without viewing any other pages.
Create fictitious pageviews in Google Analytics for pertinent events as a possible remedy, which will help you define your website’s bounce rate more precisely.
You can create a virtual pageview in Google Analytics, for instance, if you have an interactive page and a visitor engages with one of its elements. This will allow you to monitor how many visitors interact with your page and stop bounces from being recorded for active viewers.
It is useful to look at your analytics to determine the various user traffic sources in order to determine where your website’s bounce rate needs to be improved the most. Users who arrive at your site via an organic search engine query, for instance, might find your content to be very beneficial, which would result in a lower bounce rate and higher conversion rate.
Content management
The most effective course of action to take if you want to increase the level of engagement on your website is to find and highlight content that you believe your visitors will enjoy (such as pages that receive the most traffic organically).
You can design your website so that the most interesting content is prominently displayed above the fold after identifying this content using web analytics.
For instance, giving your best-selling products prime real estate on your e-commerce website is a wise move because these are the articles most likely to get a visitor’s click and increase the landing page’s conversion rate. Every piece of content should, whenever possible, have titles, images, and descriptions that increase CTR.
Maintaining the freshness of your content by making sure that it is updated frequently is another method for lowering the bounce rate if a sizable portion of your traffic consists of repeat visitors.
Recurring visitors are more likely to interact with fresh and timely content, which raises engagement.
Website usability and design
You can enhance the website’s design and usability in addition to showcasing the most well-liked and pertinent content to make it more interesting for visitors. This could entail actions like enhancing the calls to action on the page, using good color contrast, adjusting font size and spacing so that text is easier to read, and improving the graphics quality.
Your website should be created so that users can quickly find what they’re looking for. Engagement can be increased by providing a big search bar and a simple navigation system, especially if your website offers a variety of goods and services. A logical hierarchy should be present in navigation menus.
The bounce rate can be decreased by using a responsive website design. This is now more crucial than ever due to the rise in visits from mobile devices. Your website might look great on a 1024×768 desktop but awful on an iPhone. Images and menus must be formatted to adapt to different screen sizes and devices. You should change your pages to use adaptive, robust, and responsive templates.
Page load time is a crucial usability improvement that can help lower your bounce rate. According to studies, if a page takes more than a few seconds to load, users are more likely to leave the page. You can identify page load time and solve this problem using a variety of testing tools.
Last but not least, removing pop-up ads and other information-heavy components from your website can lower the bounce rate. A/B testing various website improvement suggestions can help you ensure that the changes you make have a positive effect on your bounce rate.
Marketing
You can determine whether there are problems with your traffic sources, which could indicate a problem further along the sales funnel, by comparing bounce rates by channel (e.g., organic, referral, direct, paid, and social media).
It is worthwhile to review your marketing campaigns or efforts for a particular channel if it has a higher bounce rate than the others. Make sure your ads are pertinent to the site content on the landing page you are sending visitors to, for instance if visitors arriving via display are leaving your site more frequently.
If you aren’t already, you might need to make landing pages that are tailored to your campaign and have a ‘call-to-action’ that is obvious to see in order to lower the bounce rate.
In general, users will be drawn to your content if it is optimized for your top search terms. You won’t be able to convert that traffic as effectively if you aim for popular generic keywords just to get traffic.
