The bounce rate conveys the message of how quickly someone leaves a particular webpage on a website. While it’s immediately assumed a high bounce rate is bad, understanding the true implications of a bounce rate requires a deeper dive. Not everyone who bounces is disappointed. Exit rate is another term that comes up when considering bounce rate. Hopefully this will be an easy to understand introduction to bounce rate.
What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?
A bounce indicates how many visitors “came, saw and left” a site or webpage. Bounce rate measures how often visitors exit a website without visiting anything else. Exit rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave from a particular page after already visiting other pages on the website. The last page, the one the visitor left from, is considered the exit page and will be measured to calculate the exit rate. Bounce rate only tracks single page interactions while exit rate tracks what happens after a visitor browses around the website.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website without visiting other pages. It is calculated by dividing single page sessions by the total visits.
Bounce rate = Single page visits / total visits ( bounces / sessions)
A single page bounce rate gives an idea of the quality of that page while a site wide bounce rate helps analyze the overall engagement rate on the site. The higher the bounce rate, the less effective the site is in engaging visitors. A high bounce rate will affect the site’s conversion rate. Conversion rate is the number of users that complete a specific goal. A goal could be completing a purchase, signing up for an email list, clicking a call button, clicking a book now button, anything.
What is a good bounce rate?
A good bounce rate is dependent on the goal for a particular page. This really depends on the goals and target audience. However, in general a bad bounce rate, means that high value traffic is being lost. For example, a blog page, single page site or landing page bounce rate may be as high as 70%. A bad bounce rate on conversion focused pages like product pages on an ecommerce site is a cause for concern. Improving the bounce rate, that is decreasing it, on these types of pages can positively impact conversion rate.
What is an ‘average’ bounce rate:
Usually the lower the bounce rate, the better. In general, a bounce rate can be anywhere between 25%-70%. Certain industries will have different average bounce rates. For example, for an ecommerce site, a visitor to an ecommerce site is like a customer in a store. You want that online ecommerce visitor to look at various items on the site before buying, very much like a customer in a store. A visitor to a news site, blog or dictionary is looking for something specific and usually have single page sessions and will leave after they have found what they are looking for.
Why is my bounce rate high?
There are many reasons why a bounce rate is high including website factors such as site speed or page load time. But it can also be due to poor marketing campaigns that promise a particular experience than visitors encounter once on the website or webpage. Below are some other reasons to consider when a webpage or website has a high bounce rate.
Poor user experience:
If a visitor can’t find what they need they will leave, increasing the bounce rate. There could many reasons for a poor user experience including excessive pop ups, ads, complicated navigation, lack of informational pages such as About and Contact pages.
Bad Website design:
This could be due to unorganized navigation, non uniform distribution of elements such as images, content and unrelated hyperlinks on the site’s webpages.
Slow loading speed:
Seconds make a difference when it comes to load speed and can make all the difference to bounce rate. A 100 millisecond delay in load time can impact conversion rate by up to 7%. A slow website can also put off visitors resulting in some users leaving before the page even loads up.
Bad and outdated content:
Having content that is outdated, such as an address or phone number or even something as simple as expired specials can lead to a higher bounce rate. Blog posts or pages with poor target keywords can also lead to high bounce rates because it shows up in searches but information/content on the page is not necessarily relevant to the user.
SEO issues:
Meta titles, title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, slugs…ensuring all these SEO components and more are implemented on each webpage throughout the site.
Technical errors:
Ensuring there are no broken internal links, shrunken images, bad typography, inconsistent design and poorly designed checkout experience on ecommerce sites may contribute to high bounce rates.
Non responsive website:
With more people using mobile devices to browse the internet, not having a responsive website that adapts to varied screen sizes can lead to higher bounce rates.
Are there other factors that may contribute to bounce rate?
Traffic channels:
The traffic channel can be a factor in bounce rate. For example, a visitor to a site that comes through an email or a referral are less likely to bounce than a visitor from display ads, social media which produce very high bounce rates.
Engagement metrics:
Considering additional engagement metrics such as session duration, page speed and ranking factors when considering bounce rate.
Mobile vs desktop:
How the visitor gets to the website and user intent and usability can differ greater between desktop and mobile. The variance between mobile and desktop bounce rates can be more than 16%. [reference]
Any other last reasons for a high bounce rate?
The webpage doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations:
Perhaps the visitor was looking for one thing but found something else. Search intent and page content don’t match. Reasons for this could be,
- Page is optimized for the wrong keywords
- Ads may have created expectations that the webpage doesn’t meet
- The answer to the visitor’s question isn’t immediately visible.
- Plugins and other add-ons may be annoying and may affect usability negatively.
Visitors find what they are looking for quickly:
A high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If a visitor with a specific intent found exactly what they were looking for then they have no reason to stay on the page and will leave. For example, the weather forecast on a news website, people visit the webpage to quickly check the weather or temperature and then leave. However, in most cases the goal is to lower the bounce rate. Getting visitors to browse more pages on a site means the website provides additional value and this has a positive impact on the SEO of the site. Adding relevant internal links to other content on the website will keep visitors on the website.
Low Quality pages or content:
A poor quality page can impact a visitor’s experience on the webpage. For example, an unattractive web design can cause people to leave the page, too many irrelevant items on a webpage can distract focus, too small text or an unreadable font can be an obstacle to some visitors. Nobody wants to work hard to find what they want on a website. Consider the following questions when faced with a lower bounce rate,
- Is the user experience intuitive or can it be perceived as awkward by visitors?
- Does the webpage/website load fast enough?
- Is the call to action obvious enough?
- Is the webpage mobile friendly?
- Is the content accurate, well written and engaging?
Note: Ensure the webpage doesn’t produce an error and the analytics are set up correctly. A very low bounce rate can also be cause for concern.
This was brief introduction to bounce rate and some of the reasons people may leave a webpage. If a particular webpage has a high bounce rate, take a look at the goals for that page. If they are being satisfied, then maybe a high bounce rate is good. Visitors are finding what they want and are leaving satisfied. If goals are not being satisfied, then take a closer look at the webpage and see if anything may be putting visitors off and causing them to leave before fulfilling your desired goal.
References:
- What is a Good Bounce Rate?, seigemedia, URL: https://www.siegemedia.com/strategy/bounce-rate
- Does Bounce Rate Matter in 2022?, URL: https://www.madebyspeak.com/blog/posts/does-bounce-rate-matter-in-2022
- 2021 Digital Experience Benchmarks by Industry , Contentsquare, URL: https://contentsquare.com/blog/2021-digital-experience-benchmarks-by-industry/
- https://contentsquare.com/insights/digital-experience-benchmark/
- https://www.similarweb.com/corp/research/benchmarking/
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