Bounce Rate
What is a Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the total number of visitors that view a single site page and leave without doing anything such as clicking links, signing a form, or purchasing a product. A high bounce rate doesn’t always equate to something negative, and it depends on the businesses’ goal. However, analyzing it is still crucial as it can help online business owners determine their marketing efforts.
Some factors that can affect bounce rates are the page type, CTAs, technical issues, content, and site design.
Good vs. Bad Bounce Rate
When calculating bounce rate, getting a high number is bad. While achieving a low number is good.
Bad bounce rate (high number) shows that there’s a problem with the business’ page. It might be for the following reasons:
- Content is irrelevant or uninteresting
- Slow page loading time
- Lack of call-to-action and links
- Poor site design
A high bounce rate can also mean there’s a problem with how search engines crawl, index, or rank the website.
On the other hand, good bounce rates (low number) show that the page is user-friendly, organized, and efficient in providing the users a clear goal or call-to-action. It can also mean that the page’s content is enticing or convincing enough for them to click.
More from Findstack: Check out our guide on ‘Best Landing Page Builders‘ and find the right tool to design highly-converting landing pages and reduce your bounce rate.
Average Bounce Rate
A report from GoRocketFuel.com stated that the average ranges from 41 to 51%. However, this varies depending on the niche or industry the website is in.
This graph from Backlinko shows the difference in average bounce rates on different website niches.
To analyze the bounce rate correctly, businesses and individuals should compare their percentage to the proper category.
When Does It Matter?
The importance of Bounce Rate varies depending on the business goals and what type of page or website they have. For example, bounce rate is vital to an e-commerce business because a high bounce rate usually means problems with the product or service listed on their site.
Moreover, e-commerce website pages are commonly sales, landing, or product/service pages. Meaning to say, if the bounce rate is high, people are not clicking or buying, which can affect their sales.
Bounce rate is also essential for PPC pages and advertisements. Poor bounce rate usually equals low conversion.
On the other hand, bounce rates aren’t as crucial for long-form and informational content pages like blogs. This type of page is usually filled with relevant and valuable information to the audience, so if the web page’s bounce rate is high, it doesn’t really matter as it doesn’t affect leads or sales.
Moreover, the bounce rate of traffic that comes from social media or SEO isn’t also essential.
How Is Bounce Rate Calculated?
Bounce rates can be computed through online apps like Lido or various free online calculators.
To do it manually, people can follow this simple computation:
Bounce rate can be computed by dividing the total number of visitors who left without engaging by the total number of web page visitors, times 100.
For example, the total number of web page visitors of an X landing page is 2,500, and the total number of people who left without engaging is 567. So 567 divided by 2,500 times 100 is equal to 22.68%.
This bounce rate is reasonable. However, the business or website owner should check out how that compares with other websites in their industry and explore ways to decrease this number if possible.
