What is bounce rate?
Your bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit your website, land on a single webpage and do not do anything (do not perform any action) on that page before leaving your website. Your bounce rate shows you how many of your page or website visitors leave your website without performing any action like buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
This metric can be used to measure your website’s engagement and to understand how well the content is working.t.
How is Bounce rate calculated?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your site, do nothing on that landing page and leave the site. It's calculated by dividing single page sessions by all page sessions.
Bounce rate in digital marketing
1. Exit Rate vs Bounce rate
Bounce rate and exit rate are both used to gain an understanding of website engagement levels, but they aren’t the same thing. While the bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors leave a website without performing any action on it, the exit rate is a measure of how many users exit a website from a specific landing page.
The main difference between these two metrics is that the exit rate the percentage of visitors who exited your website from a certain page without telling you anything about whether the user visited any other pages on your website or that was the only page they visited. Essentially, every bounce is an exit, but not every exit is a bounce.
Let's take an example. If a product page on your website gets 100 visitors and 50 of these visitors exit your website from that page, then your exit rate is 50%. But if 100 visitors landed on directly on that product page and 60 of them left your website without performing any action, then your bounce rate is 60%.
In the first example, 100 visitors landed on a product page and 50 left your website from that page, but there is no mention of whether these visitors navigated through any other pages on your website to reach that product page before leaving.
2. Conversion rate vs Bounce rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who take a desired action. This action could be making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. Conversion rates are often used to measure the effectiveness of a website or marketing campaign.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who leave the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may indicate that visitors are not finding what they are looking for on the website, or that the website is not meeting their needs. A low bounce rate may indicate that visitors are finding what they are looking for, and are engaging with the website.
While conversion rate and bounce rate are both measures of how well a website is performing, they are not directly related. A website can have a high conversion rate and a low bounce rate, or a low conversion rate and a high bounce rate, depending on the specific goals of the website and the needs of its visitors.
What is a good bounce rate?
A good bounce rate is rather subjective. It depends on the type of page, and the source of traffic. If your page contains an informative article and your main traffic source for that page is organic search, you might see a rather high bounce rate, maybe even in the range of 90%.
If you’re wondering whether a high bounce rate is good or bad, the answer is that it isn’t necessarily either. If your page is designed for your visitors to perform a certain action, then a high bounce rate could be a bad thing. But if your page is informative, then a high bounce rate could simply mean that the visitor found everything that they were looking for on that page without needing to dig deeper into the website or perform any other action. In such a case, a high bounce rate is rather normal.
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To help you understand what would count as a high or low bounce rate, anything upwards of 56% could be considered to be high, while a bounce rate in the 41% to 55% range would be considered average. A low bounce rate would be something in the 26% to 40% range.
It’s rather unlikely that could get a bounce rate below 20%, if you see that you might want to take another look at your data and check your tracking mechanisms. You might see inaccuracies in your bounce rate due to duplicate code, incorrectly implemented tracking, and third-party add-ons.
The bounce rate could even vary depending on the device that is being used to access your website. Mobile devices happen to have the highest bounce across all industries (they have a 51% bounce rate).
A high bounce rate could also be caused by factors like bad design, errors in your tracking code, excessive bots, or browser incompatibility. If a high percentage of your traffic comes from social media or paid ads or views your website over mobile devices, you might face a higher than usual bounce rate.
How do you reduce your bounce rate?
Here are some steps that you can take to reduce your bounce rate substantially:
Optimize your website for mobile
You need to provide a mobile-ready experience that is engaging. For example, your visitors shouldn’t need to zoom in to read the content. The mobile experience should be user-friendly and interactive. You should consider using video content, but make sure not to have long videos since those might require more data to stream, thus hampering the user experience and making the user bounce.
Check according to the traffic source
You might notice that some traffic sources have a higher bounce rate than others. You need to meet your visitors' expectations, irrespective of the source. Figure out what visitors from various sources would be looking for and make sure to give them what they want.
Avoid disruptions
You want the user experience to flow well. Avoid disruptions like full-screen popups. Those could annoy your visitors, cause them to bounce, and even cause search penalties. Instead of that, you could use a chatbot with a call-out message that isn’t so intrusive and disruptive.
Cover all the right topics
You need to match your keyword intent to your content so that organic visitors can find the content that they are searching for. Ensure that the keywords you are ranking for align with your actual content.
A/B testing
You can create two versions of a product page and make use of different designs and CTAs on them to see which of your changes work better and bring in better results. Half your visitors would go to one version of the page while the other half goes to the other version of the page. This A/B test would help you understand which changes lead your customers to actually perform the actions that you want them to and result in a lower bounce rate.
Improve content
The easiest way to decrease the bounce rate of a website is to improve and make the content relevant. The more interesting or better written the content, the more likely the reader will stick around and explore the page more. Relevant content is also the key, It's important to stick and focus on what kind of the content the website wants to offer.
Optimize your page load speed
Visitors are more likely to leave a website if it takes too long to load. A slow load session will just frustrate the visitors and get them to leave the website without even checking anything out. Make sure that your website is optimized for fast loading times.
Internal linking
Internal linking can help visitors find more of the content they are interested in on your website. This can help reduce bounce rate and keep visitors engaged.
Use effective calls to action
Calls to action (such as "click here" or "sign up now") can help encourage visitors to take a desired action on your website. These CTA's can lead to higher conversions too.
Lowering Bounce Rate With Meta Descriptions
Meta description is the information that appears under the title of a website in a Google search. They help in adding some depth to the description of a website presence on a search page and are therefore essential in garnering relevant traffic.
Meta descriptions do not rank by keyword but helps with filtering out traffic that is likely to bounce, while also drawing in those more likely to interact. Remember, however, that meta descriptions only show up to 155 characters, and should, therefore, be concise and targeted to get the right information across.
How to check bounce rate in google analytics?
In Google Analytics, bounce rate is defined as the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e., sessions in which the user left your site from the entrance page). It is calculated by dividing the total number of single-page sessions by the total number of sessions.
To view the bounce rate for your website in Google Analytics,
Step 1 : Go to the "Audience" section.
Step 2 : Click on "Overview"
This will show you the bounce rate for your website over a specified time period. You can also view the bounce rate for specific pages or groups of pages by going to the "Behavior" section and clicking on "Site Content", and then selecting "Landing Pages" or "Exit Pages".
It's important to note that the bounce rate in Google Analytics only measures the percentage of sessions that are single-page sessions. It does not take into account the amount of time that a visitor spends on a page before leaving the site. Therefore, a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean that visitors are not finding what they are looking for on your website, or that the website is not meeting their needs. It simply means that they left the site after viewing a single page.
