What is bounce rate?

Any business who has a website designed and developed by our team will also have a Google Analytics account. The business can access this account at any moment to see how their website traffic is doing, goal conversions and other analytics. 

More than likely, a client will notice what is called a bounce rate. This is one of the biggest questions out there for a business or client pertaining analytics. 

Our SEO experts are here to tell you not to freight. Do not panic. It will all work out in the end. How do we know this? Our full service digital marketing agency  is here to tell you, yes it matters and no it does not matter. Here is the breakdown! 

What is a bounce rate? 

Google Analytics states that a bounce rate is, “a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.” 

This means a bounce rate that is calculated on a single-page measures how many people click on the page and abandon the page without clicking elsewhere on the website. If searchers are clicking on the service page and leaving without navigating to other pages on the website this would affect the overall bounce rate. 

The breakdown 

Let’s break down how all the pages on your website and their bounce rate are calculated to give you an overall percentage in Google Analytics. 

Optimizely gives a great example of a bounce rate, “..if the homepage of a website receives 1,000 visitors over the course of a month, and 500 of those visitors leave the site after viewing the homepage without proceeding to any other pages, then the bounce rate of the homepage would be 50 percent.” 

The bounce rate is shown below for a website. You can see the bounce rate is 62 percent. It is high but nothing to worry about. 

The next question that follows this is, “what is a good bounce rate?” 

Search Engine Journal breaks it down for us on what these percentages could mean.

50 percent and anything lower is above average

56 percent to 70 percent is high but nothing to worry about 

70 percent and higher means there is an issue with the website

As one can see, a website between 50 to 70 percent is in the average range. 

Why and when it matters 

Our full service digital marketing agency explains to our clients that any percentage above 60 is normal and anything below 50 is awesome! 

Clients often consider a high bounce rate with a website that is not working. This is because the bounce rate is such a high percentage, but this is not true. For the most part, the website is fine. 

There could be a high bounce rate on certain websites such as  ecommerce. The searcher is finding their product and leaving because of the  price. 

If you notice a website’s homepage has a high bounce rate, this matters. The homepage is the first page that a searcher is viewing. Why aren’t they  navigating through the other pages? Is it properly optimized for mobile? Is it ranking in the wrong industry? This is when bounce rate is critical to understand. 

A PPC ad in conjunction to a landing page with a high bounce rate is not good. If the landing page of the PPC advertising is extremely high, people could be abandoning the page without taking any action. 

This could be the page is not optimized with the right keywords or content or the advertisement is not reaching the right target audience. 

On the other hand, it could show that the leads that are not qualified are abandoning the page and the other leads are following the CTA. There are two perspectives to look at this notion with. 

As a full service digital marketing agency, we are here to tell you that there are only a couple of times when a high bounce rate is critical and needs to be addressed! Other than that, it means a couple of pages could be optimized better and need to be reviewed!