What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

​Your visitors left the page they came in on.  They may have arrived on your site based on keywords.  When they arrived, it was not what they expected.

Bounce rate = the total visits to one page /divided by/ the total entries to one page (Tv/Te=Br).

Bounce rate is the percentage of a single visit to your website, and they leave without viewing another page.   The more pages each person visits, the lower your bounce rate percentages. And that's a good thing!

How important is Your Websites Bounce Rate?

Monitoring your website stats will help you gain a clear understanding of what is working and what isn’t.

Now you can do more of what is working and stop doing what isn’t.

Are you checking your Google Analytics regularly? If so, awesome! If not, why?

It’s easier to make improvements when we have a starting point. Another screen to monitor routinely is your websites bounce rate. ​

When the bounce rate is high, it means one of two things:

1. The keywords used or the landing page message did not reflect what viewers saw when they arrived.

2. Your website visitors are not as thrilled about your content as you are.

The good news is, when we know what’s broke we can fix it!

Average website bounce rates:

• A low bounce rate:  25 - 30%
• An excellent bounce rate:  26 - 40%
• An average bounce rate:  41- 55%
• A high bounce rate:  56 - 70%
• An alarmingly high bounce rate:  70%-up​

​

Mobile bounce rates are typically

10-20% higher than desktop

When a bounce rate is lower than 20%, it’s a strong indication there is a problem with your Google Analytics implementation or your Google Analytics implementation or setup.

Different page types have different bounce rates:

• Retail sales site 20 -40% bounce
• Landing p (CTA) 70- 90% bounce
• Service site 10 - 30% bounce
• Content website 40 - 60% bounce
• Lead generation  30 - 50% bounce
• E-commerce bounce rate N/A
• Email campaign bounce rate N/A
• Banner ad bounce rate N/A

​ 
Why are people leaving your site?

• Your web pages are loading too slowly. 
• Confusing layout, having difficulty navigating
• Your content is not in alignment with your SEO
• You have too many or too few CTA’s (call to actions)
• Your content quality is not enough, not rich enough
• Your pages are not optimized for mobile

 
What affects the bounce rate?

• Pop-up ads survey music or streaming video
• Search engine ranking up page ranking higher or irrelevant keywords having higher
• bounce rate
• Type of audience
• Landing page design & message
• Emails and newsletters
• Page load time, longer load time = higher bounce rate
• External site links took them away; they did not return.

How to improve the bounce rate?

• Make your sites theme responsive (mobile optimized)
• Improve your content, add more detail with keywords, links, etc.
• Add or fix the call to action
• Organize your menu, remove unnecessary clutter, simplify your message with good keywords.
• Optimize page load times (highly important)

Why visitors leave your landing page?

• The page load time is too high.
• Navigating around your website is confusing.
• Your banner message is unclear.

Speed Matters

The recommended load speeds: 

• ​PSI = Page Speed Insights = a tool that measures your web site, pages, and posts speeds so that you may make improvements.
• FCP = First Contentful Paint = the time navigation begins until the browser renders the first bit of content from the "DOM" = DOM Document Object Model= the HTML structure of each page.
• FID = First Input Delay = the time from when a user clicks a link to the time the browser responds.

Knowing your page load speeds will help you make adjustments accordingly.

Test your post, page, or website here:   Googles PageSpeed Insights

​How to improve bounce rate:

• Maintained top rankings for your brand
• Provide relevant content
• Interlink to other relevant pages within your website
• voice search function prominently
• speed up page load using Google page speed plugin
• get rid of pop-up ads
• reduce external links
• Make external links open in a new window
• Make your message clear on the landing and web pages.

​I hope by now, you have a better understanding of what bounce rate means.

Please leave your comments below!   Ask questions or suggest a topic.

Thanks so much for visiting!

Leslie  🙂

P.S.  Please let me know if I may help.