The “bounce rate”, according to Google Analytics, is “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.”
The question that needs to be asked is not what’s the average bounce rate across all websites, or even all websites in my industry, but what’s the bounce rate for my website, is it good or bad, and what, if anything, should I do about it?
Bounce rate is an inherently subjective measure of performance. That is, you shouldn’t really compare your bounce rate to that of other websites other than for entertainment purposes. The reason being there are simply too many variables affecting the bounce rate, and what applies to one website, even if it’s a direct competitor, may not apply to your website.
For example, my SEO firm’s website is located at mwi.com and has a bounce rate of 65.75% over the last 30 days. Having a three letter domain is great when I’m telling people to go to my website, or when it’s being used in print marketing, but when it comes to SEO and being listed in Google it’s a dubious advantage. The issue is that there are a lot of other companies and organizations out there with the name MWI, and as a result I get a lot of traffic from people looking for MWI Veterinary Supplies, MWI Partners, Mid-wives International, etc. Then there’s the traffic I get because MWI is an acronym for terms like many worlds interpretation, and something to do with Cisco IP phones. Obviously MWI has nothing to do with these entities or terms, but that doesn’t keep people from typing “mwi” into Google and clicking through to our site. Once on our site, people immediately realize we’re an SEO company, not a law firm or a theory of how the universe works, and they bounce away. So this makes our bounce rate considerably higher than it would be otherwise. Is this a bad thing? Surprisingly, it might be. According to this bounce factor experiment there is evidence to suggest that Google uses data from Google Analytics to rank sites, and sites with lower bounce rates can see their rankings affected positively.
But leaving that for the moment, what if I were to compare my bounce rate to the bounce rate of one of my competitors? Chances are my competitor’s don’t have their websites commonly confused as that of another company’s, and so all other things being equal their bounce rate would be lower than mine. But if I didn’t take that into consideration I’d be thinking “Man, what’s wrong with my site?” and that might lead me to make changes that aren’t necessary and that wouldn’t produce any benefit.
The data becomes much more relevant if I measure it against itself over time or against other factors. If you have launched a new website then you will probably see your traffic increase over time. If, as your traffic increases, your bounce rate also increases, it might do to investigate why this is happening. It could be that your website is ranking in Google for keywords that you think are relevant to what you do, but perhaps when other people search for that keyword they are actually looking for something different than what you do, and so perhaps you should revise your keyword strategy.
If you experience high bounce rates (over 70%) then it might be that your website stinks, to put it bluntly, and you need to redesign it or do a better job communicating through your entry pages. Then again, it could be something else entirely. In looking through data for the 30+ sites I have access to I see bounce rates all the way from 16% to 90%, and in each case there are various reasons why those sites have those bounce rates, and a low bounce rate isn’t necessarily a good thing, since it can mean a lack of traffic.
If you see a sudden increase in your bounce rate, chances are some sort of event has taken place that is driving new traffic to your site which, for some reason, is not sticking on your site. If there were a sudden spike in my site’s bounce rate the first things I would do would be to look to see if there is a corresponding spike in overall traffic, and then I would look at my traffic sources to see if there is a spike there that explains where the traffic is coming from.
But even with this data, it’s often hard to say what you should do with it. Obviously a high bounce rate means your site has low relevance to visitors, and so to capture more of those visitors you can work on making your site more relevant. But this only works if your site really is more relevant than people think. In my case, there’s no reason for me to try to make my firm’s site more relevant for the people who are searching for veterinary supplies. That is traffic I have to live with and can’t do much about. I’d have a bigger problem if that traffic wasn’t bouncing, since that would mean my site seems relevant to those people and if it seems relevant to them then it’s probably not relevant to those I’m truly targeting.
To sum up, the bounce rate is affected by many things and there is no blanket answer that can be applied to all website to say “When your bounce rate is high you should…” Each website is different, each situation is different, and analyzing bounce rate data requires a hands-on approach–just one more reason why SEO can never be fully automated.
Personally I think if your sites bounce rate is > 60% you’re probably not attracting qualified traffic
If its around 40 – 60 then you could try a different strategy with your content to keep people interested.
Google Analytics video series points out that the 40% area is typical overall. I have a number of personal ecommerce sites, and very few are less than 25%, and one even as low as 10% (not a ton of search traffic on this one though).
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/bounce-rate-demystified.html
I agree with the importance of the bounce rate. Recentley I have been working on a website with consistnetley hight bounce rates, with one internal page ranking for a pretty competative keyphrase.
The bounce rate was around 85% for that page/phrase in a seven day period.
Guess what is happening? The site is bouncing up and down the SERPS like nobody’s business, sometimes dissaperaing for a day or so at a time.
Sure, other factors could play a part on this, but it seems like a coincidence as its holding its position for the other targetted phrases!
Thanks for this post.
It’s a pretty complex issue. The Goal of your website is really the issue, I reckon. If that means
visitors going to another page then you’d be wanting bounce rate to be low but what if you just want an affiliate link clicked or a form filled out at the bottom of a very long page?
So, I would say reformulate the issue of bounce rate in terms of a site’s goal.
Your summing up is absolutely perfect. I have had to wait weeks (on 2 occasions months) to prove to a customer that there is no real reason why you can’t imporove bounce rate quickly. They were insistant on more CTA’s, better use of H1, H2, etc. and I did a reallllly simple A/B test and they were extremely surpised at why. In some cases it took a while to “collect sufficient data for a clear winner” but you’ve hit the nail on the head. And did it 2 years ago. Good post Josh.
Thank you sooo much for explaining what Bounce rate is I always thought it was directly tied into Goals.
High bounce rates are the result of poor landing page design and/or poorly targeted marketing campaigns.
i agree, a poor landing page design is the main reason.
Thanks for the clarification on bounce rates, one of the main questions I get asked from people is, what is a bounce rate and what is a good number to have? Google need to be more clear on the explanation for this in Analytics.
I guess it also depends on the type of business of your site. I.e. if someone is looking for something specific, and it gets it – the user is happy, but they don’t need to look for anything else. True that, if they like your site they may stay to have a deeper look, but it doesn’t have to be necessarily like this.
An example can be lyrics pages – you go to search a specific page – you got it, bye bye.
Thanks
I think it depends on the content too. If I show up on a site and all I see is misleading or poor quality content, I am definitely clicking away. When I started with one of my sites, I had a pretty high bounce rate, but as the content became sticky, people are at least interested in seeing what else the site offers that will be of value to them. That number has dropped much lower while the unique and repeated visits have gone up.
I found your article while searching for averages for bounce rates. My site’s bounce rate is 57%, is it good or bad? If I am getting traffic from unrelated keywrods, then what should I do?
How to improve my bounce rate, any?
Good article, I posted a link at http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/28340-bounce-rate-reduced-to-9/page__p__185624&#entry185624 as it covers an interesting topic involving a website with a 9% bounce rate.
Thanks
I have seen a bounce ratio of about 50% very common to Web Design companies
Or — a cause of high bounce rates could be that your visitors are able to get what they’re looking for immediately on the first page they land on and don’t need to dig around.
I agree with Thor. I have a one page blog about each car or news, and my bounce rates are around 80% because visitors usually find what they are looking on the first landing page.
Very good info. My bounce rate is currently 22%. It’s a fairly new site…hope I can continue seeing this below 30%.
I agree with Thor many blogs for example will often tend to have a high bounce rate by their very nature. Bloggers may write about a variety of topics and often it is only one or two pages that may relevant to a user coming in via a search engine. They find the information they were looking for and leave.
However that said high bounce rates on a homepage is undesirable as it often shows users cannot locate information quick enough or perhaps more importantly, cannot see how to locate information quickly enough.
Exactly: In landing page issues, in addition to considering the bounce rate, you have to consider the time spent on the landing page. If you have a high bounce rate on a landing page, but visitors stay for a long time it could mean they are findingo all they need in that one landing page, proving that the landing page (even though it has a high bounce rate), was beneficial for the visitor.
So my point is to consider bounce rate with time spent on the page.
Only consider a bad landing page if you have a high bounce rate and low visitor time.
Cheers.
Thanks for the helpful explanation.
We have a “personality” website we post to daily, mostly for fun and to keep our humor writing, cartooning, and photo skills in shape. Topics range across the spectrum of whatever we found interesting that day. Still, it’s interesting to see what topics and medium were most compelling. And no surprise, looking at bounce rate shows that topics that are part of a thematic thread or are completely unique to our site have the lowest bounce rate.
For instance, I crocheted a hat last week in honor of Alexandre Bilodeau’s Olympic gold medal for Canada and blogged on it, titling it “In Honor of Gold, I’m Making A Bobbled Bilodeau.” Three days later, we posted “Bobbled Bilodeau Update,” and guess what? A bounce rate of zero.
Thanks again for enlightening!
Ciao, Kathy
i have an average time of 1:07 and a 73 percent bounce rate
http://www.confessionhub.com
i guess 40% is normal bounce rate as i have same on http://pkfunda.com/videos and attracting more people to come to my site
Helpful article really, so from my understanding of your article, you can avoid high bounce rates by simply getting traffic from relevant sources, meaning trying to optimize in search engines for long tail keywords which will bring visitors that wants your service or product..
And as you said people were coming to you using a very general and multi-meaning keywords.
Thanks again
Mike J.
Thanks for the article. I’ve had a hard time actually understanding exactly what I could do about a bounce rate for awhile now. After taking a look through the read I found another site which actually has some tools to correct this and thought I would share. http://www.tldkit.com/website-development/bounce-rate-tools/
Thanks for this article. Now I know my bounce rate of around 55% is pretty high. I’ll need to do some work on this area.
We have just published some updated Google Analytics metrics about bounce rate and time on site and other key metrics here:
http://www.analyticsseo.com/seo-community-research-program
I agree that is dependent of the content. How about a newspaper website? I receive e-mail with head lines and I usually hit 2-3 link and read the articles the close the windows. That would make a 100% bounce rate.
Same on my website which is a e-commerce solution and I try to combine it with different types of reviews. I have ~35% bounce rate from main page, and 82% from articles from organic search only. I find this normal.
Only further consideration on your excellent summary is that a high bounce rate is not a bad thing, if the first page has all the info that the visitor needed (not in my case unfortunatly).
If the bounce rate is high, but the visit time is high also – then it is possible / likely that the page had all the info required, and the visitor did not need to visit other sites.
I may need to re-design my website – http://www.ideas4makingmoney.com/ – as the bounce rate is 57.6% currently (traffic largely PPC currently rather than organic).
my bounce rate is anywhere from 78-90%. I have never been lower than 78% It sucks
because i really care about the site, but for whatever reason most traffic does not.
I have bounce rates below 50% for some refering sites and keywords but that is only in cases where traffic is coming from a relevant site and for short relevant pharase keywords. To hell with long tail, I have done work to rank for some long tail and the bounce rates are always 85% . Not worth the time ranking. So for me it is a mixed bag.
I found this article when researching a question for a client. Even though this article is a few years old, it would be nice for an update to see what you’ve learned about the bounce rate of your clients, how seo affects it, and the bounce rate of your own site.
I noticed that the bounce rate of my company’s website went up when we added our blog. We rank well for many odd terms, such as “why is twitter so successful”. Although we do get more traffic, a lot of it comes from the “do-it” yourselfers, and I think when people see we are an Orange County based seo firm they bounce.
Selling gold jewelry or cash for gold is something that I think should attract a pretty qualified visitor, but our site has a bounce rate of about 64%, which really sucks. I agree with Tim that it is an indication that we aren’t attracting a qualified crowd, but not sure what the best answer is.
I was reading the comments and since I have changed my site here are my stats from Google
Visits
1,384
% of Site Total: 100.00%
Pages/Visit
The average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Pages/Visit
6.57
Site Avg: 6.57 (0.00%)
Avg. Time on Site
The average duration of a visit to your site.
Avg. Time on Site
00:02:08
Site Avg: 00:02:08 (0.00%)
% New Visits
The percentage of visits by people who had never visited your site before.
% New Visits
59.25%
Site Avg: 59.25% (0.00%)
Bounce Rate
The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
Bounce Rate
0.36%
Site Avg: 0.36% (0.00%)
I am very very happy 0.36%
cheers