It is quite likely that your company is spending tons of time, energy, and dollars on web marketing efforts yet conversion rates (or ROI) are stuck in the two to three percent range.
You are trying really hard to figure out how to improve the performance but you are stymied by the fact that there is ton of data and you have no idea where to start.
Ms. Bounce Rate to the rescue!
Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool. It is easy to understand, hard to mis-understand and can be applied to any of your efforts.
So what is this mysterious metric? In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave "instantly".
Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.
Your marketing efforts should yield more customers who are able to conquer (accomplish the task they are there to accomplish) and fewer who say yuck and leave.
Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.
Definition:
It is usually measured in two ways:
- The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
- The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).
I am a bit more aggressive in my analysis and so I personally prefer the latter definition (using time). But either definition is fine, each has its own slight nuance.
It is important to note that the first definition is the standard definition in tools like Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo! Web Analytics, CoreMetrics etc etc etc. Having only a single hit (usually page view) in a visitor's session will mark it as a bounce.
[In Adobe's Site Catalyst bounce rate is not a standard metric, but you are able to create a special custom metric. Please check how to with Adobe's customer service or your account rep.]
So how can you use it?
#1: Measure the bounce rate of your website.
This will help you understand what percent of your website traffic is actually engaging with your site (i.e. you don't have a chance of success with all your site traffic!).
This IndexTools report shows that approximately 70% of the site traffic above is bouncing. This 70% won't even give you five seconds, or see more than one page. You can't even start to impress them with your goodness. No matter how great your goodness is.
There are two exceptions: 1) You have a one page website 2) Your offline value proposition is so compelling that people would see just one single webpage and get all the information they need and leave.
If you don't fall into those two categories you need to pay very careful attention to this metric.
Action: You'll understand better why your conversion rate is so low, if you have made changes over the last x amount of time then watching a trend of bounce rate is a sure way to know if the changes you are making are for the better.
#2: Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources.
Your goal is to figure out if some sources of traffic are sending you particularly terrible traffic compared to others. In your web analytics tool simply go to the Referring URL's / Sites report and take a look, you'll find something like this……
For this site Google Analytics illustrates that both myspace.com and simplyhired.com is not sending great traffic, while their direct marketing campaigns (#2 and #3 above) seem to be doing much better.
Action: Do you need to revisit relationships with sites that are not sending you high quality traffic? What is the call to action that is causing people to come to your site and bounce? Are your email, affiliate, other marketing campaigns yielding low bounce rates? You get the idea.
#3: Measure the bounce rate of your search keyword.
Search engines are king and hence probably sending you a large chunk of your traffic. Find out the quality of traffic coming from the search engines. In addition to looking at just the aggregate levels (the row marked Total in below report) also look at each key phrase……
In this ClickTracks report notice that each key word / key phrase performs differently, and it also differs by search engine. Sweet actionable information. Instantly useful!
Action: When you create SEO and SEM campaigns ensure that your team has this data. In this case either you have nothing to do with competitive intelligence (hence 90% bounce rate) or that traffic is landing on the wrong pages. Also it is easy to take a dump of top keywords and bid on them with PPC campaigns, the table above will ensure you don't bid on the wrong ones.
#4: Measure bounce rate of your AdWords, AdCenter, YSM (PPC) campaigns.
In my humble experience this is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook when doing paid search campaign analysis.
Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website (or see more than one page)!
This screenshot from Google Analytics shows the bounce rate of traffic on each keyword compared to site average, very cool view. Sadly most traffic for this time period is performing worse than site average (so literally you could be sending money down the, well you know what).
Action: First, stop bidding on those keywords, then do a deeper analysis of how good your landing pages are, and your other campaign attributes (maybe your campaign for refrigerators is being targeted to people only in the great state of Alaska!).
#5: Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages.
It is entirely possible that your efforts are stellar (as they usually are!) but it is your website that is letting you down. There is what to do to make your case…..
What pages are bouncing traffic like a perfectly formed elastic material and which are great at welcoming traffic with open arms into your website? Pull up the above report in your web analytics tool and find out.
In addition to top trafficked pages on your site please also look at top entry pages report and measure their bounce rate (you'll quickly have a list of pages that need your immediate attention).
Action: Check to see if the right calls to action are on the page? Is the content optimally organized? If the above pages are your campaign (direct marketing or paid search campaigns) landing pages then are they delivering on the promise of the email piece you had sent out or the search keyword? Answer these questions and consider multivariate testing to improve page performance.
An Exception :
There is one obvious case where bounce rate might not cough up as many insights. I am thinking of blogs.
They are a unique beast amongst online experiences: people come mostly only to read your latest post, they'll read it and then they'll leave. Your bounce rates will be high because of how that metric is computed, and in this scenario that is ok.
You don't want the bounce rate to be 98%, new visitors to your blog will still come and look around and read different posts etc.
So… if you have a blog segment your bounce rate by New and Returning Visitors. You can ignore the returning bucket, because of above. Focus on the New Visitors. You still want a low bounce rate (say 40% or 50%) for your New Visitors because you want them to take some action and engage with your brand (in my case click on a link to my book or to my company Market Motive or to my RSS feed – all ways in which I get economic value from this blog).
In summary:
- Bounce rate is a metric you'll easily find in all web analytics tools.
- It is easy to understand, hard to misunderstand (something you can't say for all, or even most, web analytics metrics).
- It is awesome at identifying low hanging fruit (you stress about so much, start here and you'll easily find so much to action), try the above five tips first.
- Please don't confuse bounce rate with exit rate, they are radically different metrics. Also: Everyone who comes to your site has to exit, almost no one who comes to your site needs to bounce! [Relevant blog post: Standard Metrics Revisited: #2: Top Exit Pages]
Would you agree this is a awesome metric? It won't have all the answers for you, but it will help you focus very quickly on what's important, show where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting.
As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.
What do you all think? Please share your tips, tricks, war stories, critique, brickbats via comments.
[Like this post? For more posts like this please click here, if it might be of interest please check out my book: Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.]
Really great post. I recently wrote about bounce rates in our company newsletter but this is so much more in depth.
It must be one of the most easy to understand and useful metrics. I especially like your tips on how to use the metric.
Thanks
Yes Adam, I agree with you.
Really good information shared by the author.
Well written, clear AND actionable. I'll be looking at my bounce rates this weekend!
Avinash,
cocerning bounce rate reports in Analytics, there is somethig about the numbers i can't understand. Maybe you can shed some light on it.
I have an AdWord Keyword with a Bounce Rate of 100% but 54 Pages/Visit. How can that ever be? If a Keyword generates 54/pages per visit, how can the bounce rate be 100%?
This is something which i believe is impossible and can't understand.
See here for a screenshot of what i mean:
http://www.stefanseiz.com/images/analytics-bounces.gif
Thanks
Stefan
Dear Avinash
I am struggling with a bounce rate which I dont understand.
If I had the possibility to add picture I would, I will try to explain.
I have a mobileversion of a website. It shows:
Page view 6700
Unique page view 6100
Avg time on page; 6 min 13 sec
Bounce rate: 93 %
How is it possible to have a bounce rate = 93 % and in the same time avg time on page 6 min ?
I will be very greatful if someone have time to explain this for me.
Regards
Anita
Anita: Time on page and bounce rate are two completely different metric.
Bounce rate measures the number of visits on your site with only one page view. It measures nothing else.
Time on page measures the number of minutes someone spent on a page, BUT only for those people who see more than one page. I.E. those who did not bounce.
Why is time on page measured only for people who don't bounce? Please see this article for more details: Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site
So in your case…. 93% of the people see the page and bounce. They don't see any other page. The time on page for them is N/A (not available, see above article). 7% of the people do see more than one page, that 7% on average stays on your first page for six minutes and thirteen seconds.
I hope this helps.
Avinash.
Thank you very much for your quick and helpful answer, Avinash. It was clarifying. When I read your answer I know I knew it but somehow these numbers looked "greek" for me.
The thing is that the page I'm refering to is a mobile page and has only six links on the front page. In addition to a menu button and a button to a page for downloads. The menu button and the button to downloads has 93% clickrate. I am wondering if it is possible that visitors are clicking but GA can not track it some how and thats way it looks like visitors has used about 6 minutes to look at 6 links.
Wel I have to digg further.
Thanks again. I'm so greatful that you took your time to answer.
Regards
Anita :)
I have always been a big proponent of bounce rate analysis, but you helped me take it to an even bigger level. Thanks!
The Google Analytics charts look easy too!
–Wil
Avinash,
Bounce rates are great, but we also should look at something like "Stagnation rate"…ofcouse I am making up this name. What this will do is focus on is sessions, that stayed on the site for above say 20 min. This is especially critical for eCommerce sites. This will clearly show that customers who came in to buy something, are not able to easily complete their tasks. Creating a customized experience for these set of users can dramatically improve customer experience on the site.
Another excellent and insightful article Avinash. I have just posted an article on the business benefits of user testing, which alongside taking a broader view of user behaviour with web analytics provide an extremely powerful and conversion increasing exercise, as you will have experienced.
In reference to Rahul's point on improving e-commerce customer experiences, again alongside a customized user experience user testing can lead to exceptional case studies to push through user experience enhancements and redesigns.
You may note towards the end of my post I have provided a few links into relevant articles on web analytics from yourself, so thanks for the great articles once again which support the business advice I am providing..
Paul
How does Google Analytics define "bounce rate"? Is it 5 seconds or less? Thanks!
Great post, No comments! :-)
However; I would like to add a TIP if I may? – And that delivered with my new found mantra in mind: “For any analytical and detail oriented person starting out on a career in Web Analytics, try not thinking about magic tools and metrics or whatever – Think about Money. It’s honest!”
So when you suggest, and correctly so, to measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages – I tend to suggest either on top of that or as a replacement metric to:
– Measure bounce rate of your top revenue participating pages and/or keywords
As this list is ALWAYS different than that of your “top trafficked pages” list. This also enables you to (as our good friend Jason Burby keeps talking about) create an almost instant monetization model – as the money is out in the open and almost calculable on the spot.
Cheers
Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog
To add a practical example, on request of Big A himself. ;-)
The problem:
* Have a simple page as part of a larger site. Rest of the site is by and large irrelevant to this page.
* This page offers a product (Source code. aka tarball) for download.
* Want to better "sell" that product, and hence increase downloads. [1]
Using no segmenting or anything special beyond a simple report, I noted that ~42% were bouncing off that home page. Or phrased positively, 58% were doing something else with the site. Possibly downloading the tarball – doesn't matter per-se.
So what am I doing *wrong* to cause people to leave? What can I change to help more *want* to use the product, or at least download it???
So what did I do?
Split that single page up into moderately obvious separate pages, and re-evaluate.
The idea of doing the split was to get a greater understanding of what people are looking for and want out of the product. At least in terms of getting increased downloads of the tarball. :-)
Well it worked. Sorta. Bounce is now down to ~39% (~3% improvement). Ifs, Buts and Maybes around this too: didn't have an official release that month, so numbers were lower than normal. ie. not exactly a fair comparison.
But the point is that I now have an appreciation of what they're looking for. Without doing any referral analysis to cross check, the top urls portion of the new report shows that the "Demonstrations" page is the next most popular. Fair bet that's what the visitors are looking for. The "Features" page is further down.
So what next?
I'm aiming to do the following tasks:
1. Somehow pretty up and better "sell" the demo page.
2. Note that the demo page doesn't actually make it easy to download the tarballs. That needs to be fixed *pronto*. aka: "Call to action". *All* the pages need a simple "click here for the tarball" action item.
3. Most importantly: the current product home page, if you'll excuse the pun for those in the know ;-) , is awful. Really needs to do a better job of actually *selling* the product. Reduce the bounce at the source!
So we draw two major views out of Bounce Rate:
A. That people are not being sold on the landing page. aka Product Home Page.
B. That those who aren't bouncing are going to pages that could also do a much better job of selling.
And that's just using a *reporting* tool [2]. Imagine what you can do with Segmented Analysis. ;-)
Cheers!
– Steve
[1] Do be aware that raw downloads alone is not a KPI here. Soft indicator more than anything else. The full details of all the issues involved would overly complicate this example to no real value.
[2] The irony being that the tarball in question is that self-same reporting tool. ;-) Eat ones own dog-food?
Stefan : I am afraid there isn't enough in the image to help identify the issue, could you please email me the "grid view". The other metrics in that view I think will help identify the problem.
Rita : GA uses the "single page view in a session" definition. You can simply click next to the question mark next to any GA metric to get the definition…
Dennis : As always you make an excellent observation but I suspect that would lead to soft of a catch-22 situation. It could also sometimes (not aways) lead to ignoring low hanging fruit. Let me explain.
The pages you expect to be "revenue participating pages" could, pardon my french, suck becuase either they themselves have huge bounce rates (hence not producing "top revenue" :)) or could be suffering becuase web pages that are supposed to lead to them could be bouncing hugely.
In either of these two scenarios it will take you much longer to find the problem that needs fixing.
Here is the order I usually recommend (once you reach best practice #5 in above blog post):
Step One: Look at the Top Entry Pages report and bounce rate for each. You will find the low hanging fruit – pages that are your core entry points and bouncing traffic rather than absorbing. These could be landing page, product pages, revenue generating page, tech support pages. Fix 'em.
Step Two: Look at the Top Visited Pages report and bounce rates. These again should be absorbing people not bouncing them (don't look at Exits). Since they get seen the most any fix here has high roi (by increasing "absorption").
Based on your excellent feedback going forward I'll always add step three (for e-commerce websites)…
Step Three: Traffic is being absorbed nicely on your site, identify your core "revenue participating pages" and look at bounce rate. These pages (usually with product details and add to cart buttons) might be getting less traffic but now that people can actually find them you'll get huge roi for your investment.
Does this make any sense?
I concur with you (and Jason) that focus on revenue and monetization is important, but sometimes we focus on it too early missing low hanging fruit with high roi as well as potentially ignoring large chunks of visitors who are not on your site to buy.
Steve : Bravo!! Six hours has got to be the fastest someone has taken a post I have written and turned it into action! :)
Thanks so much to everyone for all the wonderful comments!
-Avinash.
Avinash, I am intrigued by your definition of bounce rate as "users who left the site in less than 5 seconds". This type of measure would give us an indication if the users were not interested in he site at all, or took some time to read the content. However, I see no way to measure this this time. Time on site is usually measured as the time between to clicks on your site, and visitor who are not doing a second step on your site are not included. So I assume it is not possible to calculate the time on site for the users who bounced. Any thoughts?
I wanted to add something that seems obvious but I don't see it mentioned:
If someone is bouncing (leaving within 5-10 seconds), they haven't read much of your page yet.
I think Avinash's article mentions it a bit…
Your visitor must believe that the landing page answers the question or solves the problem they had when they clicked to your site.
Your page must clearly communicate what it's about- if it's confusing or overwhelming or the headline sucks, they bounce.
I don't think a "bouncer" is getting much more into their brain about your page than the biggest headlines or bold words, an image, the layout, an overall impression.
So I don't think it makes sense to talk about details of the copy etc. (things that lead to conversion after you pass the no-bounce test).
Hope that helps,
Brian
Florian : Ahhh… good point. N/V (no value) to the rescue!
You are right, that time on site is essentially computed using "time between clicks". You see page one at 1200 hrs and page two at 1201 then time on page one is one minute.
If you only see page one at 1200 hrs (for one minute) and then leave (bounce!:)) then all analytics tool by default have no value for you for time on site.
If your web analytics tool allows you to segment by time on site (say ClickTracks) then to compute bounce you can say "segment all the sessions with time on site of five seconds or less".
No Value (people who saw only one page) are in the less than five seconds bucket.
They'll get included.
You have a slightly richer understanding of bounce rate (as Brian Carter put it) becuase in such little time someone could have seen a bunch of pages in five seconds yet they got little out of those pages and were never really in the game for you to convince them about anything.
So using time on site is a bit more aggressive way to computing bounce, but I have usually advocated to marketers that it is the definition they should use becuase it sets a higher bar for marketers and website owners.
-Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
great blog post. I'm helping somebody out with the SEO of his website and try to get him to do some web analytics, too – and an article about bounce rate is just what I needed, now!
When you use the rule of thumb that it's hard to get a bounce rater lower than 20%, 35% is already kind of bad and 50+% is very bad, can these bounce rates be applied across most industries?
Im a bit surprised, because usually everybody always goes "it makes no sense trying to pinpoint an average number as it varies way too wildly across industries", but for bounce rate it's kinda similar from industry to industry? (just curious, b/c knowing what a bounce rate that needs improvement is could help me a great deal with this project)
If it does vary wildly what would be a normal bounce rate (no cause for concern) for a website that sells cars or used cars, etc. ?
thanks!!
Hi Avinash,
Let me get this straight. Do you mean:
a) I get a better understanding of bounce rate by segmenting the 20% (for example) of users that don't technically bounce.
b) I can get more data (how long did they spent on the landing page b4 leaving) about the 80% of users that bounce.
I would love b) but can only see a)
Hi Avinash. I think with your "hard to misunderstand" comment that you underestimate our ability to misunderstand things. :-)
The WAA Standards Committee began to define bounce rate and its sister single page visit thinking they would be no-brainer definitions. We ended up discussing them over several weeks. The sticking point was this: some of us have run across sites where visitors will refresh a page, or perhaps the page will refresh on its own after a set time (sports sites with a scoreboard or sites with frequently updated news are two examples). It is unclear from many vendor definitions whether or not visits that include only one page viewed multiple times contribute to the bounce rate. Our conclusion is that they should not, since they don't represent a true bounce.
That's a good argument for using a metric based on visit duration like you have described above. However, I'd be careful calling it a "bounce" since that's not what that term represents for most of the available tools.
I for one am for the longer, more in-depth posts – but I am also probably in the minority.
Do you feel that bounce rate objectives/expectations fluctuate by large percentages across industries? I would have to imagine that websites with larger dollar items, or products/services with longer buying cycles should expect higher bounce rates (with the exception of brand specific searches/relationships) in comparison to something like a retail e-commerce site.
Derek : Yes the bounce rates will fluctuate but I am having a harder time with the latter part of your hypothesis.
Each site and industry vertical will have its own unique bounce rate profile, after all there is no such thing as a generalization (and before someone else says it: yes I realize that is a generalization in of itself!). Please take the above mention "bands" as guidelines and then overtime benchmark against your own performance (this is one metric that should go down over time, if you are getting better).
I don't know if any kind of website should have a "higher" bounce rate. If there are long buying cycles or high dollar items then you probably want people to spend more time and not less on the site (and hence have a lower bounce rate) since the visitor is so much more valuable.
Overall it is hard to acquire traffic. No matter who you are what you do. That traffic should stay on your site for more than one page or more than five seconds, else was it worth it to acquire them?
Thanks so much for the comment.
-Avinash.
Sorry for the confusion and appreciate the reply. I've been working with a company (with a fairly complex offering) to move their bounce rate to lower than 50%, which is why the question arose. However – your comment on the amount of time a user would want to spend on the site – evaluating, learning etc – is a key point.
I feel that to some extent, an assumption is (was) being made simply because of the complexities in the product buying cycle and I'll need to take this into consideration for additional/updated content development and internal navigation. Thanks again for the valuable response!
Avinash
I am engrossed in your book WA An hour a day – great read.
You mention it is not possible to measure how long a visitor is on the last page since time is calculated from one log entry to the next and since the page away from our site is not known, the time on the last page is always stated as zero. So how can you measure bounce rate at 5 seconds? What am I missing??
Thank you. My new deity. And yes, I bought the book (and another book on the same topic, and the other book is due for the recycling bin or immolation.)
Like Peder, I'm reading your book (and loving it by the way) but I'm confused by your support for the bounce rate as a meaningful metric after reading your discussion about the problems with interpreting single page visits (p 138-139). How do you reconcile these two seemingly different views?
Exceptional. and i don't even work in the field!
I'd like to know if there are an international standard that says if my bounce rate is within the normal range , or it is too bad and need improvment?
If we're talking about bounce rates being defined as when someone views only one page – I think there are scenarios where a high value may not be bad.
Consider a regular reader of a blog, who visits often, reads a new post, and then leaves. They only visit one page, becuase they have already read previous articles.
Or – someone links to an article on you site from a forum, visitors come and read the relevant article and leave.
In these situations, a high bounce rate is not neccessarily a bad thing.
It is a good blog and a lively discussion. I remember reading that GA counts a bounce as a visitor that views one page of your site and leaves. The definition of leaving the site also includes a session time out which is 30 minutes.
Theoretically someone could spend up to 30mins on a landing page and leave. This is ample time to read a story or view a single page.
So as Sam B says if someone direct links to one page on your site or gets an RSS feed to certain content or reminder of updated content (i.e. this very page) then it follows that Bounce Rate may not be a bad thing at all for content driven sites.
While I agree that for commercialised sites bounce rate can be a real problem for other sites that are content based it appears that bounce rate 'may' not necessarily be an issue.
David :You are right. If success for your website is one page view then obviously Bounce Rate will not help identify the wheat from the chaff.
I had noted Blogs as an example of a exceptional case at the end of the post above.
I would hesitate to say that bounce rate is not a good metric for "content" sites. Take CNN for example. I could read the latest news on one page and leave, but CNN probably wants me to read more so I can see more ads and perhaps click on 'em. So they would care about bounce rate.
Just a example. Your comment highlights the need to ensure a clearer understanding of what you are solving for and to that I say Amen!
-Avinash.
PS: Here is a post that might be helpful in understand the time component and how that plays itself out:
Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site
Thanks Avinash.
Of course any site with advertising will want as many pages viewed as possible if there are advertisers. I was just trying to point out that as you say any metric (incl Bounce Rate) must be viewed in context of the page and the intent of the page involved.
I have come across marketing 'gurus' who will take the bounce rate and subtract it from the traffic stats to essentially discount the number of people visiting a site. I think that this is an erroneous method and one that I hope isn't adopted as standard across the industry.
Great post – thanks! This is so interesting and you explain it so well.
I delve into the time vs. page topic in my post from today and encourage my reader to visit this post as their homework. You're writing to a higher-level audience, but the importance of bounce rates is still the same.
Thanks for your work!
This is great.I have watched a couple of videos from you. English is not my native language & find your explanations always smooth & very to understand.
Thank you
Note: bounces are percentage of entrances that left without visiting another page. I mean, even 100% bounce rate may be "safe" for some pages. For example, I have "products" page on my site, top-visited, with 80% bounce rate and 13% exits. It is intermediate, menu page with few links only. Intended to give site visitors quick navigation way. The important point is that only few visitors came directly to this page — in fact, no one should came directly to that page, but it happens. And when 10 visitors came to that page this month, and 8 leave, this is 80% bounce, although thousands other navigate tro9ugh that page and it is with the lowest exit rate of the site :-)
Hello, I'm grappling with an issue concerning Bounce Rate in Google Analytics. Take this example: I visit a page, refresh it and leave. That is 2 pageviews, 1 unique pageview, 1 visit but is it counted in bounce rate or not???
Many thanks for your help!! Jiri
Jiri: That would not be counted as a bounce.
The definition of bounce rate, as outlined in the post above, is those sessions that only have one page view.
In your example the session has two page views, so no bounce.
Though as you can imagine we are in slightly gray matter land from a marketing perspective. :)
-Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I have a web site which has dynamic pages and the url does not change. So if the user is navigating to different navigations where the page gets refreshed but url remains constant. Will that be considered as Bounced visit for that particular URL.
Kevin: It is best to work with a GACP who can help evaluate what is actually going on and give you the best answer based on your unique circumstances. Here's a list: http://www.bit.ly/gaac
Generally speaking… As long as a hit is going back to the analytics platform, it will record the continuation of a session. In your case, from the limited info you've shared, it might get recorded as a page refresh/reload. This is of course not what is happening (people might be clicking and seeing new content).
Regardless, the data you are collecting is useless because it won't let you make any smart decisions. If you work with a GACP (and your web developer) then can do the combination of ensuring a page parameter (if not a full url) get's added to the URL on click, or you use events to capture new content, or something like that to make this data useful.
Avinash.
Thank you for the information we have been looking for – especially the benchmarking % numbers.
If we have a new (less than a month) nearly 100% Flash site , are not doing SEM, and SEO has not been attempted yet — should we be concerned about a 68% bounce rate at loading/home page (the only way to enter the site)? (We are.) GA shows us that access speeds are good, the version of Flash is fine, and that as intended – our tween (12-14 yrs old) target is coming to us by directly entering our URL or clicking on banner ads. I'm questioning if GA is good at reading Flash sites, and why I see a 100% bounce rate on an inner page that can only be accessed by coming in through our home page. Is the validity of the 68% BR at loading/home and 100% BR at inner page worth questioning?
Nikki: For the last part of your comment, 100% bounce, it is important to remember what the metric measures: The number of people who enter the website on a page and then leave from that page.
So your "inner page" could have 100 visits. 99 from the home page (or any other page) and 1 visit directly to it. If that 1 visitor saw the inner page and left that's 100% bounce rate.
You might think that the page is not accessible from any where :) but never underestimate the ability of search engines to index your content, or your website developers or company folks bookmarking inner pages and then visiting them to check them out and leave from there.
In a nutshell 100% bounce rate is ok. Check what % of total visits is that. In the above example, if 100 visits and 99 bounce then freak out, if not then chill. :)
-Avinash.
Thank you. It is very difficult to enter at our inner page though – in fact I cannot figure out how to do so.
What is your take on GA and how good it is at reading Flash sites?
One more question: Any idea why we have GA stating significantly lower referral site traffic source visits than what those (paid banner ad) sites are reporting to us as their click-through rates? Then I will leave you alone! :)
Thanks!
How do you use a 5 second timeout to determine bounce? Most users will land on a page and spend more than 5 seconds reading it. If we set a cookie timeout to 5 seconds the reports will show almost 100% single page visits. Obviously not helpful.
Great post!
I think a definite consideration for campaign planning is to set goals ahead of time around desired or acceptable bounce rates and time on site (instead of traditional visitor count and conversion metrics)
Great page! Lots of great information. Here is what I am finding on my own site. The pages where the bounce rates are highest is what we call category pages. These pages are pages that have links to all of the different subcategories, once a customer clicks on the subcategory he or she is interested in, then that link either takes them to the actual product, or to another subcategory page where they can select the products they are interested in.
Not sure if having these subcategory pages are a good idea. Any input from all the pros here would be greatly appreciated. I am really trying to understand all of this, and yes it is a lot of data, but nonetheless it is good data and good things to know.
Avinash,
Excellent post. You seem to be THE Google Analytics evangelist.
Is there any way to see natural search keyword performance trended out by month? Or do I need to manually download the total BR by month for each keyword and map it out.
I'm trying to zero in on the what were the main culprits driving up my bounce rate over the last 5 months.
Thanks,
Breakline
Breakline Marketing: If you want to just look at a few keyword you can just drill down to the keyword level and switch the main graph up top to Bounce Rate and that will give you exactly what you want.
If you want it for a whole host of keywords (which is a very normal desire :) then I am afraid there is not a pain free way to do it.
If you are looking for the biggest bang for the buck just go to the keyword report, look at the keyword with the highest visits and then choose bounce rate in the next column and without too much effort you have your priorities starting at you. :)
-Avinash.
What if the visitor leaves that page in the 6th seconds? What if a visitor click an external link on landing page that opens in a new window? The landing page will remain open may be for a session or even more but that depends upon the visitor’s returns and the further action to that page. In the above scenarios time is above 5 seconds. Your second definition is not fulfilled in both the case but your first one might get fulfilled if the visitor closes that page on his/her return.
I think Bounce Rate should be taken in account along with other factors, like:
1. Type of Traffic Source
2. Relevance of KW to Landing Page
3. Type of Audience
4. Subject matter
5. Top Landing Pages
6. Top Exit Pages
7. Time on Page
8. Content Quality
…
Also can we take Exit% in consideration along with Bounce%?
In that case:
A page having low exit rate and bounce rate will be …? (in my opinion good)
A page having high exit rate and bounce rate will be …? (in my opinion bad)
A page having low exit rate and high bounce rate will be …?
A page having high exit rate and low bounce rate will be …?
Please, if you can, explain the relevance between exit and bounce rate for a particular page. My friend Manoj Salwani(http://seo-interview-questions-answers.blogspot.com/) is having the same problem.
Thanks for the article. I get around 300 visits per day on my site, and over 54% as bounce rate. Have tried different layouts and contents, but it keeps hovering at 54% :-(
Awesome post. So Many Things About Bounce Rate Has Been Cleared Now.
Thanks.
The complexitites of the bounce rate statistic and its uses are, as you mention, often over looked. I must say that you explain it all very clearly and this page will help everyone who is lucky enough to find it!
Great Stuff. I was just surfing to web to see what people thought was a normal bouncerate for their site, I am glad I came across this site.
Sorry no time to read all comments but my 2cents:
Only problem with bounce rate is that it assumes that viewing multiple pages is "good" and a single page is "bad." Although many times this is the case, sometimes the opposite is true: for example if you sell an offline product (like apartments) and direct ad clicks straight to a page with everything they need to know (to maximize the chances of a physical visit) then bounce rates will be low however the number of actual purchases might go up since.
So really you just need to know the definition and strategy behind each metric well. Bounce rate is a good metric, but so are Visits and Campaign drilldowns. All depends on your strategy.
I am on board with the bounce rate! However, some people in my organizations is fully satisfied with 95% BR (at least we get 5 % to click trough) – however I would say, let's get down to 90, or 80 or 75 % and imagine what could happen then.
Have you Avinash, or anyone else had experience with this when the Hippo is "content" with the numbers? What to do to "force" them to realize that 95 % BR is 95% potential users lost?!
I am the first "web analyst" in the organization, so it has to be "down to basics" "no brainers" :)
Great post, as usual!!
If I understand, GA considers bounce rate as the percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
But I prefer the second definition of bounce rate (time notion), which is quite different : how is it possible to measure this with GA or Webtrends?
Gilles: In Google Analytics you can simply use Advanced Segmentation to segment out people with more than x seconds / minutes and bam (!) you have what you want.
Here is how you would do it:
As you can see in this case there were, deeply sadly (!), only 12k Visits out of 61k that were more than 10 seconds.
Now with a press of a button you can apply this segment to any report you want to (Paid Search, Referring URL's, Direct Traffic, Value of Landing Pages etc etc).
I am not exactly sure how to do it in WebTrends, but I know that you should be easily be able to do it. Please check with their tech support folks.
Before you do it in either tool please check out this post first and understand how time is computed in any web analytics tool:
Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site
Good luck!
-Avinash.
Thank you for this article! Very interesting..
I have average bounce rate ~50% at my blog.. I have a look on the graph of bounce rate through the time range from the "start of my blog" till this day and see how it smoothly decreasing from 60% to 50%.. IMHO it is terrible result.. :(
I would agree that "anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying." but I can't understand why it is unreachable to get 20% and less..
Even at google adwords by testing for a lot of ad variants I have not received bounce rate less than 30% and I think it is bad enough.. :( 30% of the payed money is completely wasted.. (If we don't count the events, when user haven't a lot of time and bookmark page to come visit it in future)..
It would be good for me to hear some advice from you regarding my blog (may be something I could do better there), but it is in Russian, so I would not disturb you with this!.
One more time, thank you for the article! Now I understand bounce rate better! :))
thanks for the excellent post. I checked the entrance keywords for one of my landing pages. For some keywords the bounce rate is low for some its high. But there are several keywords for which the bounce rate is zero. Is there any explanation for zero bounce rate.
There are a lot of web sites where a high bounce rate is a good thing, not a bad one. Sites where someone immediately finds what he wants. For example:
1) dictionaries
2) almanacs (search "zip code for chicago", e.g.)
3) phone number directories
4) weather forecast sites
…in short, lots of reference sites. I would hope that the search engines don't penalize sites for high bounce rates without allowing for lots of exceptions for "reference" sites like these.
Avec: First something very very important: Bounce Rate analysis is important for your website and creating a connection with your Visitors so they don't "puke" and leave your site in a second.
There is nothing any where that indicates, as you mention in your comment, that "search engines penalize sites for high bounce rates". To the best of my knowledge this is completely false, for all three search engines.
To rephrase, Bounce Rates have nothing to do with your search organic ranging.
Second, I do take exception to the "blanket immunity" to the sites you list in your comment. I have a really hard time accepting that there is any "for profit" site in the world where success is a Visitor coming, seeing the content and exiting.
I think of this as a Businessperson. If I have a dictionary I want people to see the definition but maybe also bookmark it for future use (boom, no bounce), or check other definitions (and see more ads and click no ads and give me revenue). You can see how that works for weather forecast sites as well.
Most sites you mention in your comment make money with ads. Today their monetization probably is on Impressions. Ok. Would it not be better to figure out some kind of Outcomes and get people to engage with the site and start charging more based on CTR? Or even charge more for Impressions because of more page views per visitor?
I am not asking them to be annoying and just create more pages but give the visitor something of value which allows the Visitor to engage, to come back again in the future, sign up for a email alert system (when weather in my zip code will be higher than 200 degrees :), etc etc. Not all visitors but if your bounce rate is 90% you can certainly engage 20% of that audience? No?
There are certainly exceptions in life, you might have noted my "exception" in the post about using bounce rates for blogs.
I still push back on anyone who says "one page view is enough", I push back to just make people think harder. :)
-Avinash.
Great article and tips! Is 40% very high? I was looking at my bounce rates last weekend and it seems that I've got lots of work to do.
Hi Kaushik,
That is very helpful tips on how to fight with bounce rates.
I will surely have to work a lot for my site.
Thank you,
Aslam
Chris: The right number for you would depend on what kind of site you have.
For a blog for example 40% might not be worrying. But for an eCommerce site 40% is getting there in terms of something that is worrying.
One thing is for sure. Regardless of your number today it has to go down month over month. You are not going to get down to zero but 40% means there is some room for improvement (remember depending on the site).
So look at the last 12 months, has it been going down?
If yes keep doing what you are doing, forget the others.
If no then you have a lot of work to do, regardless of the others.
-Avinash.
I have a home page that has a lot of my product on it and its fairly easy to click on the type of product you are looking for to drill it down and purchase what you want. So theoretically can't my bounce rate be linked to the fact that its easy to find what you are looking for on another page in the site? They come to my home page, then go somewhere else very quickly to make a purchase or it is based on people that leave the site completely?
Frank: It is important to know that Bounce Rate is when people don't take any action on your site.
So in your case when I come to growingcooks and click on aprons on the home page and go to the aprons page that is not a bounce.
It would be bounce if I do nothing and just leave your site.
In another case if I go to a site, it is just like growingcooks but 100% of the links on the home page lead me to a different website (say foodtv.com) then that does not have to be a bounce either. You want me to go to foodtv.com (hence you have all those links on the home page), you do a simple configuration change in your web analytics tool and that would be counted as a bounce.
In this case it would be bounce if I don't click on any link on your site and just leave.
Hope this helps,
Avinash.
Excellent Blog!
Thanks to the Google Blog which made me land up here.
I installed Analytics for my Search Engine optimization blog and what I am finding is that a lot of puking is going on. I have added a few affiliate marketing ads on my blog and I am getting no conversions. However, the traffic is superfluous the bounce rate is too high.
I suspect its the use of third party template which is slowing down the loading time of my blog and then ultimately accounting for the high bounce rate on my blog.
What ever it is.. I am gonna bat it out very soon.
Thanks for the excellent post Avinash. :)
I came across this post because I was wondering how relevant 'bounce rate' is for blogs. Essentially, depending on how your blog is laid out, people may spend 10 minutes on the home page but, if they never leave that page, they bounced.
I just wonder if the best metric when it comes to blogs may just simply be 'time on site'.
NOTE: At the end of the above post you'll find a An Exception section. Please see that for your answer. – Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
Thanks for running this great site and publishing your wonderful insight.
Along the lines of Derek in #94, I wanted to know your thoughts about pages or sites that are not deep (link-wise, not content-wise). In my case, instead of a blog, I'm running PPC to my product pages, which makes them both the landing page and the exit page, unless there's a conversion. So by GA's definition, everything bounces unless there's a conversion. (I suppose other tools won't be much better since they can't measure the duration on a single page in this case) My dilemma is not having a good bounce rate metric for my product pages.
I thought of a workaround, which is to give a summary or a preview of the product, and then have visitors click on a link for the full details. However, I suspect that may increase the real bounce rate, or decrease conversion rate. Do you have any insight on best practices for this scenario?
Thanks!
-Johnny
Johnny: This is going to sound lame but… It is important to remember that at the end of the day you are not solving for lowering the bounce rate, you are solving for a business problem.
In your case you don't want a 90% bounce rate on your product pages, that is a waste of your campaign dollars. You want people to do something. A small % will buy, but the rest should maybe read more about the product, check out other products, learn about your company, give you a lead, maybe sign up for a account, maybe apply for a job, maybe….
There are so many things for people to do on your site. That should and must lower your bounce rates.
Please also see comment #88 above where I replied for another such scenario.
Finally I would recommend against doing "anti customer" things like having a summary and making them click on "more info", sure you'll lower bounce rate but it would be a terrible customer experience.
-Avinash.
Avinash,
3 completely off-topic questions, totally understand if you blow this off.
1. Data warehouse versus Google Analytics: any thoughts? This for a click based web start up who is not going to have user specific data (and thus no non-click stream data to link to) for the foreseeable future.
2. BI Tool ! We do have a datawarehouse going, but it is hard for SQL to do across-row queries like
"Give me sessions that did X, followed by Y, followed by Z".
I have experience with cube based tools, and while these provide lag/lead functions; I have not found one that was expressive enough.
Any BI tool/solution that lets the user express these queries ??
3. Analytics Professional: MBA or degree in Stats !? I am a DW (IT) professional in New England, who wants to migrate to Analytics. Part-time MBA would have been my prefered choice, but their lack of quant focus is troubling. (Alas, FT at MIT is not an option). any suggestions ?
S S: Quick answers to your three (off topic!) questions….
1. Data warehouse versus Google Analytics: any thoughts? This for a click based web start up who is not going to have user specific data (and thus no non-click stream data to link to) for the foreseeable future.
You have to be very careful about data warehousing clickstream data (from any tool, not just GA). It sounds attractive on the surface but the reality is you have to make deliberate choices about what data you bring over and warehouse and what the primary keys will be etc etc. There is more in my book if you have it.
The road to warehousing clickstream data is littered with dead bodies. That is not to discourage you, it is to urge caution and thoughtfulness.
2. BI Tool ! We do have a datawarehouse going, but it is hard for SQL to do across-row queries like "Give me sessions that did X, followed by Y, followed by Z". I have experience with cube based tools, and while these provide lag/lead functions; I have not found one that was expressive enough. Any BI tool/solution that lets the user express these queries ??
This is partly why the road is littered with dead bodies.
BI tools are good for business intelligence type analysis. They were not created to do clickstream (funnel / path analysis -what you are trying to do).
When I build the massive data warehouse my stress to the company was: Use the web analytics tool for things it was built for, use the DW ONLY to answer the questions that the WA tool can't (note the nice implications of this on bringing data over to the DW).
3. Analytics Professional: MBA or degree in Stats !? I am a DW (IT) professional in New England, who wants to migrate to Analytics. Part-time MBA would have been my prefered choice, but their lack of quant focus is troubling. (Alas, FT at MIT is not an option). any suggestions ?
Here is a post about how to think about your analytics career:
Analytics Career Advice:”I am an Analytics God, I want more $$. How?”
-Avinash.
I have found bounce rate is the most useful indicator to measre the quality of your websit to your target customer. The lower the bounce rate, the better change for you to win the acceptance from your customer.
So this means GA counts a download as a click?
"GA uses the “single page view in a session” definition"
Let's say you have a landing page and someone visits the page, clicks the Download link, and then leaves the page (so they only see one page of the site)…Just checking with you if GA will indeed show this as a bounce in their stats…
Well, judging by the number of comments, I guess it is not that hard to mis-understand bounce rate :-) I sure learned a lot, from your post and the Q&A in the comments. Thanks!
From a SEO point of view a high Bounce Rate can also indicate that the user got the information he or she was looking for immediately without further browsing. That is a success factor! The importance and the value of SEO is to lead the user from Google SERP directly to the right sub-page and not to the front page. SEO brings the potential customers directly to the bullseye. By only viewing on bounce rate and page views people may be fooling themselves. A low bounce rate and a lot of pageviews may also, in some cases, be a sign of serious problems. In many SEO projects I have been working on the last years the pageviews per visit on company websites has decreased dramatically and the bounce rate has increased. The conversions has though been improved, the ROI has increased and everyone is happy. When combining a good keyword strategy and a continuous SEO from a-z with Usability improvements and always improving the "selling points" a high bouncerate has been seen very often – but as mentioned – without me going around and being worried. I am sleeping very well each nights though my bounce rate is increasing :-) :-)
Trond: I am glad you are sleeping well each night! : )
But I am afraid I disagree with you. Not that your strategy won't work for some time.
I believe that ignoring a high bounce rate, or a rising one, even if outcomes (conversions) increase means you are giving up on a big opportunity to more easily add to satisfying more customers and add to your outcomes.
Here is an example.
Visits: 100. Bounce Rate: 70. Conversions: 5.
So you work hard on conversions and get to this:
Visits: 100. Bounce Rate: 80. Conversions: 7.
Clearly this is a improvement. But consider the missed opportunity (the number of people who leave right away increased). But that is ok, you work harder and this happens:
Visits: 100. Bounce Rate: 85. Conversions: 10.
Again better. This last step was harder because you keep working off a smaller and smaller pool.
My hypothesis is is that it is much easier to figure out how to convert 10 more people from a pool of 85 than convert the remaining 5.
For a concrete example of how how I could react in a situation where a single page view might be a success please see comment the observation from Frank in Comment #87 and my reply in Comment #88 in this post. Just scroll up. : )
Thanks so much for adding to the conversation.
-Avinash.
Great Post on Bounce Rate. I have one question – If Visitor A visits a website and immediately exits, its a bounce rate. But how Google Analytics calculates bounce rate if he visits the same website within the time session and views couple of pages? As per GA, visit is single because the user visits the page within the defined time session of 30 mts. The first visit is bounce rate.. what about his second visit who browses through a couple of web pages. Does Google still count it as bounce rate?
I'd appreciate if you take time to clarify this, pls,Avinash ji
Your post is great. Thanks for your expertise on analytics.
We started using analytics about four months ago (since have started reading your book), using pageviews and time on site as an indicator if a page needed help. After this post, I checked our bounce rate and it appears we might be doing something right.
I run an ecommerce site and was using 10 pageviews as the indicator that the page needed help. Is there a standard for e-commerce on pageviews?
Also, started using some comparison shopping websites (three of the big ones)for marketing and they seem to have a higher bounce rate than PPC or Organic. Is that normal?
Also, our chat software allows me to see where a visitor comes from and how long they are on site. It appears many of the visitors from the comparison site just sit there for hours? Is that normal?
Avenash,
Thank you for a terrific blog; it is a great resource for us.
My leadership asked me if it was possible to report Bounce Rate as the number of single-page visits with durations of less than 20 seconds, divided by total visits. So, I am wondering if it is possible to measure the visit duration of a single-page visit at all, since the time-on-page metric is determined by the time stamp from the second page in a visit. If there is not second page, there must be no time-on-page calculation.
Is this correct? Is there a way to determine Bounce Rate using single-page visits of 20 second or less in duration?
Thank you.
Jay: Sure you can do that.
Just use the advanced segmentation feature in your web analytics tool. For example if you are using Google Analytics you can choose time_on_site and say greater_than and say 20 seconds. You give it that a name and you are doing.
For more on how time is computed in any tool, not just GA, please see this post:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/01/standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site.html
-Avinash.
Follow up question to your post #116. Since time on site is computed by measuring the time between pages. How can you measure the time on site for a bounce? Only one page is visited right? What am I missing?
The post is very nice but, what can we do if the home page bounce rate is very high. I have checked my website stats which tell me that all my pages except home page, have low bounce rate under 10% but the home page bounce rate is very high, 60%.
So how to make it down.
Really great post you've got on Bounce Rate anaylysis! Love the way you present your insight on how important bounce rate is in analysing web-statistics and relating it to sales conversion rate. Good job! Looking forward to your next post!
Avinash, there may be a "radical" 6th metric for bounce rate: Site Design. I say it's radical because it takes a lot of work, and it entails rolling the dice without knowing for sure whether it is the problem.
Sometimes a site owner works so hard to have great content, that they forget to focus on the attractiveness of their overall design, and how it influences visitors on their journey.
The longer I play with my websites, the more I am inclined to convert them to a more of a CMS layout (I just started the process with a couple of websites). Visitor attention spans tend to be strained. I have been finding that the more you can create "easy to see chunks", or areas of interest on your website, the more inclined people are to click.
This was a great post. Thank you!
Avinash,
After watching a video clip of you on YouTube this morning, I started Googling around for benchmark bounce rates and came across an article (see link below) that I found very informative. The author quotes individual bounce rate ranges for different entries into a site (e.g., SEM versus branding display banner campaign versus direct marketing campaign.) However, this data was based on his experience working in China. Any thoughts on how best to guide my clients? (I work for digital ad agency here in the states).
I do believe there should be some distinction as users behave differently whether entering a site directly/proactively, clicking thru from a banner or more qualified inquiry via paid search.
I'd appreciate your insight.
Thank you.
********
Here's the author's quote:
"A rule of thumb based on my experience in China:
For micro sites for branding campaigns with mainly banner traffic: 85% to 90%
For landing pages of search marketing campaigns 25% to 40%
For landing pages of targeted direct marketing campaigns (20% – 30%)"
Here's a link to the article.
http://longmarch.chinalytics.com/2009/08/my-bounce-rate-sucks-what-can-i-do-a-five-step-guide/#
Paula: There are no standards because everyone is special. Very special. :)
The first and most important thing to realize is that the only desirable bounce rate is one that goes down each month. But a lot or by a little. But one that goes down. If your website's bounce rate does not show that then no benchmarks are relevant.
Ok with that said. . . .
Tools like Google Analytics provide benchmarks in the application. If you click on Visitors (left nav) then Benchmarks. You'll see your website's metrics compared to those of "like sized" and "like minded" sites. You can also choose Open Category List and choose a different industry / vertical sector to compare yourself.
Good luck!
-Avinash.
Good stuff, and well done to get featured on google's blog, I imagine the bounce rate for this page will be even higher soon ;)
Years later and I'm still concerned about this post. Here's the rub: what if the few visitors that aren't bouncing are either extremely valuable, or just sufficiently valuable enough that they validate the spend on the channel driving them? A luxury car manufacturer may get a ton of traffic from people just checking out their homepage, but only very few looking to Build Their Own, yet if those very few all end up buying then isn't the site doing its job?
I do appreciate the simplicity and easy-to-understand nature of Bounce Rate, but don't agree in your example #2 above that MySpace should be slapped around if it proves out that the MySpace visitors who don't bounce are particularly more qualified.
I love that you make easy-to-use metrics, Avinash. But it worries me when your easy metrics get picked up by people who don't understand "harder" metrics — to the possible detriment of their business.
Charlie: Two quick thoughts…..
1. Bounce rate, like every other metric on the planet, is not a panacea. It is a good diagnostic metric and in context of the businesses goals helps find lower hanging fruit to fix.
2. Say you are BMW. 100 Visitors come. 97% bounce rate. 3 visitors not only stay on the site, they go on to buy a BMW after making appointments on the site. Success? Absolutely. Opportunity? Yes. If only one could figure out how to get 3 more of the 97 to stay. Not stop at 3, maybe go for 10. That's my overall point.
I am very appreciative of your feedback. You are right to point out that it is important to look at a metric in context of the website and overall business goals.
Thank you.
Avinash.
This article is awesome, maybe some day you wish to go a little into how to compose a great landing page to have a low bounce rate, I always think that your content, your constucture and your overall layout will affect your bounce rate?
Alex: Here is a blog post that covers exactly what you are looking for:
Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages
It covers how the pages on your website can be improved in terms of content, structure, calls to action and other things to ensure they not only reduce bounce rates but also help improve customer satisfaction and conversions.
-Avinash.
DataMaxKenya has presenta a unique browsing experince. It is a navigation gateway: This means that once you land here you are supposed to be guided to another web resorce outside fo the site. So a bouce rate of 80% could be Ok
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
Hola,
well my question is.. I have an art gallery and in my home page of the web I have planty of info regarding the actual exhibition,fotos + video…how do I count if people are really interested or not? meaning, may be they have enough info in the home page..and doent mean that the page is not well esturctred,
I have a bouce rate of 39% is that any good?
Thanks
Thanks for the helpful information.
Is there a way to know how long did the visitor stayed on the page before bouncing? For each bounced visit, Google Analytics shows '00:00:00' as the Avg. Time on Page, which can be true on some cases but not in all.
Thank you
Ashish: To understand how Time on Site and Time on Page metrics check out his blog post:
Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site
It covers how time on a page is computed, why you see 0:00:00 for single page view visits in any web analytics tool and also if you want to see the time on single page view session then how you can approach it.
-Avinash.
I am in the beginning stages of testing with some Google Ad campaigns, so I am really taking your section dedicated to it at heart.
I will be focusing my main attention on my landing pages and my call to actions.
Thanks for the valuable tips.
Bounce rate isn't always a main target,a good conversion rate is very important also but bad bounce means your target of price comparison alot so price is a very important factor.
Vincent: You are right in that having a good conversion rate is very important. As is a lower funnel abandonment rate and higher per visit goal value etc etc. They are quite important.
All that Bounce Rate does is help you understand if you are meeting the very first test that you need to pass: Get the person who comes to your site to give you a single click.
Conversion starts with that first click right?
Consider this:
Visits: 100 Bounce: 60% Conversions 2%
40 people did not bounce and only 2 converted. So you are right, you can work hard to get more of the 40 to convert.
The way to think of bounce is that 60% just left, did nothing. It is likely a series of small changes can get 20 of them or 30 of them to stay on your site, give you a click. At least some of them, say 2, will convert (not hard right to get 2 of 30 to convert :)). If that happens you doubled your conversion.
Visits: 100 Bounce: 30% Conversions 4%
So they, conversion & bounce, play together.
It depends on which lever you can pull more easily, for people who have never thought about bounce rates it is much much easier to lower bounce rates (at least for the first x months).
If you have optimized your strategy (relevant landing pages, right targeting of ads and campaigns, clear calls to action etc) then you'll get higher roi out of obsessing about conversion.
Good luck.
Avinash.
PS: Even for hard core ecommerce site my humble experience does not suggest that everyone who bounces is a price comparison shopper or price conscious. See this post on how to figure out why people bounce:
* Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages
Avinash, besides your awesome advices, I have also become a fan for the simple reason that you pay attention to your audience.
I just noticed how quickly (and effectively) you elaborated on the query posted by Vincent. Wow! That's what differentiates one (business or an individual) from another.
In fact a little digging shows that bounce rate and conversion rate are closely related. Here is a chart of conversion rate (TC) as compared "1 minus bounce rate" (TE). The X-axis is keyword (hidden for confidentiality).
Basically it's very similar. You can try it for yourself on different sites / metrics, it works pretty well as long as you have sufficient data.
http://i.imgur.com/ixjDf.png
Avinash:
I would agree with your thoughts on Bounce rate. My challenge is this:
On our key PPC landing pages, we have an 800# prominently displayed. (We're doing B2B lead gen). Since Google Analytics doesn't calculate Time on Page for bounces, it's difficult to determine which folks hung around for a few minutes to pick the phone and call us.
And no, we haven't implemented dynamic phone numbers to find source (I think that all requires VOIP, which isn't going to happen here for a while).
I know 40% of my leads still come from the phone. Any thoughts on how we might measure some of our effectiveness there, aside from simply adding 40% to our conversion rates? (a sloppy solution).
I talk a little bit about how we deflect some of that here: http://levelanalytics.com/2009/12/08/tracking-the-marketing-source-of-phone-customers/
Serge: Excellent graph! Thanks so much for sharing this idea and an actual picture.
Kevin: There are number of solutions that make it really easy to track the phone calls, and you don't have to set up VoIP or anything like that.
Here are some: ClickPath (Who's Calling), KeyMetric, Mongoose Metrics, AvidTrak, IfByPhoneRead.
Using these solutions make it easier to figure out if the hypothesis that all those people who bounce called your phone number. :)
Hope this helps.
Avinash.
I want to touch on a point there,
If you go into google analytics,
Select Length of Visit from the [Visits] [Visitor Loyalty] drop down.
Then select The advanced segment, Non – bounced visitors.
Its pretty easy to see that most people under 10seconds are also the bounced visitors.
That gives me time on site for my visitors, and by working backwards time on site for bounced visitors.
In my example its clear that the bouncing visitors are happening within that first 10 seconds,
Which from a behaviour point of view, (including pageload time) makes total sense.
How much can you really do in 0-10seconds if the site is completely new and novel and what about expectations?
Pageload – few seconds.
eye scan everything 1-2seconds
Read H1, 1-2seconds
Look at the main picture(s) 1-2seconds
Hit the Back button?
Total – 10sec
Ill add a screen cap of my report if you want it.
You guys are all fiends.. lol
Hi Avinash,
Great post, I actually found you via a google video on Bounce Rate, love your saying "I came, I puked, I left" :)
Anyway – is it normal to see a relatively young site (5 months old) have a higher bounce rate?
Also any tips on reducing bounce rate other than qualify out dodgy links?
James: It is not completely unusual for a new site to have a high bounce rate. Your audience does not know who you are and what they should expect and it is quite likely you (not you specifically :)) have no idea who your real audience is and what they expect.
I call this the Purpose – Intent gap.
More detail on that gap is in this post, which also includes six specific tips you can use to reduce the bounce rate of your website:
~ Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages
Good luck.
Avinash.
PS: In your case, MSP, you also want to auto encode all your exit links (like on the Tigerpaw Software page) with Event Tracking. Two benefits:
1. If people come directly to that base and click on that link to go to Tigerpaw then that is not really a bounce and that will be captured by Google Analytics and marked as not a bounced Visit.
2. You'll know your real bounce rate and be able to focus on the right thing.
There are several ways to do this at scale like using the Analytics Pros APE. If you are using other web analytics tools you can also do something similar easily, just contact Omniture / WebTrends / CoreMetrics / IBM / whomever you are using!
Avinash,
I have a one page site. All the links go to a corporate site separate from mine with the exception of the contact us portion. My bounce rate is 82% but my direct visits is more like 50%. Are people who visit, read my modest offering and leave without clicking anything else considered bounces by Google analytics?
Thank you
Patrick: If someone comes to your site. Does not click on anything and leaves that is a bounce. This applies to every tool.
In your case, single page website, there is one important nuance to be aware of.
People who click on links on your site that go to other websites will also be counted as a bounce because that click, and it is just the way the web works and not any tool, "goes" to the other website (it shows up in their reports as a referrer).
So your click on my book links on this page (which go to amazon) go to amazon but default.
There is a simple solution: Track those outbound clicks.
If you are using Google Analytics (or any other tool in the world) this is quite easy. You can use the "fake page view upon click" method or "event tracking" method.
Now when someone clicks on a link to your corporate site to leave your single page website you will capture that click and that visit will not be considered as a bounce. The bounce rate you see in your reports will be your "real" bounce rate.
I recommend using the cleaner event tracking method: http://awe.sm/59k2T
Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I was reading your post "3 Awesome, Downloadable, Custom Web Analytics Reports" and came back here to look at the "bounce rate" comments.
Here is my small contribution:
The website I run is for a classical music label. Pages include the whole tracks available on streaming as well as links to various stores selling our music. It was therefore quite hard to know if the bounce rate of our album pages was due to lack of relevance or if it was high because people came, listened to the album and clicked a link to buy it on an other store.
Three things helped:
– a 4Q survey which told me that half my visitors were coming to discover albums, 20% to find info on an album before going to a physical store
– time spent on the page: I thought that a bounce occurring after one minute was less significant.
– setting some objectives and some events regarding the use of external links towards other stores and the usage of the streaming option (the listen button near each track).
Reading your blog and book, as well as some analysis shown that bounce rate could not be understood right away and needed a context.
Dear Avinash,
Appreciated your visit on anunslife.org for the Digital Ministry special today. We learned a lot and enjoyed your sense of humor.
Hope you come back soon.
Thanks, Julia
I'm using google analytics event tracking to try and highlight that users are engaging with a page but are using the flash/javascript components rather than navigating around (which I think is a reason behind my site's higher than average bounce rates on some pages). This seems like a fair statement?
I'm currently exploring all the techniques for using event tracking with Google Analytics. Which brought me here :)
Richard: Flash / Ajax / Javascript components are optimally tracked using Event Tracking in Google Analytics (though the brave amongst us also use Custom Variables).
If you use either tracking method then Visitors on your site viewing only one page, but using the flash/ajax/javascript components will not be counted as a bounce.
Bounce = session with only one "hit" (hit = Page view or an event or any other piece of data passed back to the web analytics tool)
-Avinash.
Thanks for explaining well what is bounce rate.
I have a question along the lines of industry standard for bounce rate….
I work for a credit union and our homepage has the login for our online banking portal. Our bounce rate is very high on the homepage, but I have to think that is due to our members logging into online banking, which takes them to an external site.
Am I thinking correctly here?
Roscoe: Industry standards are over-rated. (But if you were looking for general guidance there are specific numbers provided in this post, check 'em out.)
In your case it is important to know that you can measure the correct bounce rate on your website accurately, hence prove or disprove your hypothesis.
Today: Land on site, click on link to go to member site, leave site. This will be a bounce.
All you have to do is ensure that the link / login to your banking portal is being captured when someone clicks on it. One simple way, if you are using Google Analytics, is to capture that using outbound link tracking (using the Event Tracking functionality).
Here's an article with the code: How do I manually track clicks on outbound links?
If you are using Omniture or CoreMetrics or IBM or whatever other tool, they all have such functionality, please ask your account rep for instructions.
Now when people do the behavior above they won't be counted as bounce AND you'll be able to accurately know how many people actually bounce. Hurray!!
-Avinash.
Thanks for this, it really explained a lot for me on bounce rates.
With recent changes to google search platform the definition of bounce rate has def. Change, still good info above though but conversation rate is the most important.
Great article and tips! Is 40% very high?
I was looking at my bounce rates last weekend and it seems that I've got lots of work to do.
Hi. Depending on the site you are running 40% might not be "very high". Especially if you are running a content only site like a blog. Please see advice in the post about looking at bounce rates for blogs by segmenting New Visitors only.
If 40% is the bounce rate for my advertising campaigns then I would freak out. If 4 out of 10 people I pay to bring to my site leave right away then that is quite pathetic. I would look to fix things right away so as to lose less money for my company.
Avinash.
Do outgoing links affect bounce rate?
I am concerned because I have pages on a site I am monitoring which has several outgoing links to either different social networks and to the 3rd party ecommrce-site.
If yes, does setting up either event tagging or virtual pageviews for these links improve or affect the bounce rate of a page?
Wendy: Bounce rate, as outlined in the article, is influenced by the number of "hits" stored in a visitor's session. If you come to the site, do nothing except just see the landing page then that is one hit. You leave. That is a bounced session.
If you come to the site and click on anything, an outbound link, a link into the site, hit play on a video, etc, then that is not a bounced session since one more hit was sent to the web analytics tool.
The only requirement is that tracking is implemented (using events, page views, anything) correctly.
Avinash.
Question on the definition of Bounce Rate
The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).
I understand this as the percentage of people who visited pages on your site in 5 seconds and then left your site. If this is so and we are looking at people exiting the site after 5 seconds, how do we know they spent only five seconds since we can't easily get the time spent on the last page due to the use of time stamps to calculate time spent.
Rashmi: The standard computation for bounce rate in pretty much all web analytics tool is to identify visits where only one "hit" was recorded. That hit could be a page view, an even, anything. But just one.
You can compute bounce rate using time as a function, you can do this manually. But in that case you are only measuring those people who saw more than one page – because as you correctly mention if someone sees only one page view the time for that session is N/A.
Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
We are having a debate over in the Google forum. maybe you can offer an opinion.
We are wondering if Google uses bounce rate to determine rank, SERP standings or anything of the sort as a quality factor when measuring a website.
There are 2 sides.
One side is regurgitating that Google has posted (on several occasions) that:
(Bounce rate) "Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors"
The second side, and where I fall is that a high Bounce rate can mean that the visitor found exactly what they needed, so there was no reason to go deeper into the site.
The thought is that if you own "Time.gov" or a provide stock rates or pieces of information that are easily absorbed, you will have a high bounce rate, but that is not a bad thing. People visit the site, get the time, and then leave, it's that simple. Or in the case of merchants, they wanted to see if it was in stock, they printed the page, they looked at the price, wanted to see available colors, etc ad infinitum.
Since there is no way to measure the intent of the visitor, how can it even be considered a viable metric to gauge quality? Or what about cases where the search requires information from multiple locations, like a compiled report, the first people checked will all have bounces, while the last person in the list will not. That doesn't mean that the last person checked had the best information, just that my compilation of information is complete or that I got tired of searching.
As a quick test, I looked at bounce rate from all search engines on one of my sites, and Google had the highest by over a 10% delta. To me, this says that Google is doing the best job of delivering the correct person to the correct page on our site. They got the information, they left (or bounced).
If Bounce rate was a factor, We would see a flood of tactics being deployed to combat this such as:
– Overlay to access the website, many Q&A sites do this (to see the SOLVED answer to your query, sign up)
– Removal of a persons ability to us the back button. This would be the new default.
– Launching new pages or redirecting people without consent. Porn, phishing, spam, and ad sites love this tactic now.
– Mystery navigation that made you "hunt" for the info you originally came for.
– Long pages with seemingly relevant links more readily available than the original info you searched for, just designed to get the clickthrough.
This list could also go on forever as well as the number of deployable tactics that no user would want, but would definitely and greatly affect the bounce rate.
Can you add your perspective or can you definitively say whether or not the metric of "Bounce Rate" is a factor in ranking?
Google does not use Bounce Rate from Google Analytics as a factor to compute anything SEO.
-Avinash.
Measure the bounce rate of your incoming traffic source… that truly is a great tip! others should really take notes as that is so huge in showing a great indicator for valuable or forget about it traffic sources!
Great article!
Hello.
I've recently read several blogs that say to look at Average Time Spent on Page when analyzing page bounce rates. These blogs have stated that if you have a high bounce rate but the time on page is also high than, you know people are finding what they are looking for or were at least interested in the content.
I would like to argue that this is untrue due to the fact that visits that bounce are not calculated in the average time spent on page in Google Analytics and therefore those users who bounced immediately were not the same users who spent time on the page.
Would this be correct?
Lindsay: You are absolutely right about Time on Page. As this post outlines…
~ Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site
…if someone visits your site and only sees one page then the web analytics tool does not know how long they spent on that page. See the first example in the post above.
In an effort to provide the people you are talking about ("blogger" :) a better proxy to use for "engagement" with the page (the only page that was seen during the session), I'd offered a solution that could capture the fact that someone scrolled on the page. The thought would be that if you scrolled we could possibly think of that as a proxy for the fact that you were reading it. It is not perfect, certainly a little bit on thin ice, but if you want to learn more about that solution you'll find it on my Google+ page:
~ More Accurate Measurement of Bounce Rates for Content Sites
-Avinash.
I'm finding that my bounce rate from Stumbleupon traffic is fairly low – in the 50% range – but my page views per visit metric from Stumbleupon is also low – in the 1.0 – 1.1 range. I don't really understand how bounce rate and page views per visit can both be low. I would expect that if bounce rate is low, pages viewed per visit would be higher. Any ideas? Does this have to do with the way Stumbleupon works?
Thanks!
-Erica
Erica: It could be any number of things, it would be hard to isolate it without knowing about your website, seeing some of the stumbleupon link etc. :)
But here are some ideas….
When I see numbers like these I check what the distribution looks like. Lots of people could see only one page, but a few might see a lot and you know what happens when that averages out.
Stumbleupon also uses frames and that sometimes might cause issues.
Your implementation could also be something to check. Standard implementation should be fine, but if you've customized it to capture events or custom variables etc that could be something to look into.
If you need any help please reach out to a GACP who can check and assist you: http://bit.ly/gaac.
-Avinash.
Mr. Kaushik, in your Web Analytics 2.0 book, so you said bounce rate is the sexiest web metric ever. I agree. What I Iike best about bounce rate is that it identifies the low-hanging fruit that need to be fixed now. If people are turned off by the page, fix it.
My student blog on Online Accountability offers some advice on addressing Bounce Rate. Check it out at terabuckley.blogspot.com/2012/05/boing-boing-boing.html
Hi Avinash,
Just wondering if you could provide some insight on how a check-out page (accessed by the search results page) could have a bounce rate of 100%? Especially as the navigation summary shows that about 97% of visits to the page are from previous pages, and the average time on page is over 3 minutes.
How is that possible, when bounce rate refers to single-page visits? Any idea what I'm missing that could explain it?
Your thoughts would be very appreciated!
I think I just answered my own question, as it only refers to single-page visits, and the bounce rate doesn't take into account all those visits that were not single-page visits (ie 97% of them)!
Couldn't get an easier explanation for the bounce-ratio. Thank you.
Please keep the good work up.
Avinash,
This is Sheheryar Khan & I want to ask how rare is 3% bounce rate because my website (FinanceTrainingCourse.com) is under 5% bounce rate since we redesign it 3 months ago & the bounce rate for July is under 3% I just need to know your opinion on it & how rare this case is. Also any suggestions if you have some time to see the site.
I await your kind response.
Regards,
Sheheryar Khan.
Sheheryar: A bounce rate that low I'm afraid typically means that there might be an issue with implementation. Either the code is implemented twice, or some events are being fired automatically on every page load, or something like that.
It might be optimal to hire a GACP to go through your implementation and help you identify what the issue might be. You'll find a list here: http://www.bit.ly/gaac
I wish it were possible to have a 3% bounce rate, sadly it is not.
Avinash.
Thanks a lot Avinash for replying.
Avinash- What about digital display ads? What is a healthy bounce rate? We've seen as low as 55% and as high as 85%. Is there a benchmark that advertisers can use?
Camille: There are not benchmarks for bounce rates, and even the ones that purport to be benchmarks are highly suspect.
Sorry.
In the post you'll see that I go on a limb and outline broad ranges that I've personally developed as guide rails (when not to worry, when to worry a bit, when to freak out). That might give you some guidance. In general if I'm spending money (paid advertising money) then I prefer to have a very low bounce rate.
But in general the only good bounce rate is one that goes down over time. It is ok if it is 85. Set a goal to get to 70 next month. Then 55. Then.. You get the point.
If you want a benchmark, look at your best performing campaigns (say paid search or a particular keyword or a particular landing page) and use that as a aspirational goal for everyone else.
Avinash.
The issue with a benchmark for a metric like bounce rate is that is is a bit arbitrary – people hit pages for many reasons, sometimes the wrong ones!
Segmentation is usually the best route to starting to understand a bounce rate issue – look at the different traffic sources and monitor their individual bounce rate over time and as you change things. Some sources, like direct and natural search, you have a limited ability to 'stop' people visiting your site.
I guess you just have to remember that bounce rate is just a ratio and merely an indicator, not an outcome.
I wish to know whether it is possible to bring down the bounce rate from 90% to zero percent. Is it good for the site if it happens in a real short time?
Mauparna: I'm afraid that almost always means that you've implemented the web analytics code twice on the page, or that you are firing off a custom variable or event or a "hit" when the first page loads.
That will make your bounce rate zero percent, or close to that. It does not reflect any improvement in customer experience.
Avinash.
Avinash,
Thanks for your reply. However, I would require some more explanation to your first sentence as I am new at this.
"Mauparna: I'm afraid that almost always means that you've implemented the web analytics code twice on the page, or that you are firing off a custom variable or event or a "hit" when the first page loads……"
Also, if possible, could you suggest some forums or study materials, which I can follow for updating myself more on SEO.
Will be of great help.
Regards,
Mauparna
Thanks for the insight.
I've been experiencing fluctuating bounce rates on my site and it occurred to me today that it's due in large part to the fact I'm running a blog. As you say in your article, people tend to read what they came for and then leave immediately.
It's up to me to provide more opportunity for them to spend a while and remain engaged in my content.
Hi Avinash , and the experts here ,
I have implemented lazy loading of images on a section of my website.
Is like an image gallery and the consumer can keep scrolling down and down.
So does this page have 100 % bounce and the consumer may keep browsing or do i track the scrolling as a virtual page view and thereby report a reduced bounce.
Regards
Vikram
Vikram: It does not have to be 100% bounce.
If you use Event Tracking to collect data for every time people scroll (or every time a page break in your scrolling appears – please see how Google Images does this), then you will 1. be able to know how much people scroll and 2. ensure that the action of a person scrolling on the page will not make that session a bounce.
If you need help in how to implement this, please work with a GACP. You'll find a list here: http://www.bit.ly/gaac
-Avinash.
You can use multiple tracking accounts (I'm pretty sure) 'if' you use the right code. In part, something like this needs to be included:
_gaq.push(
['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-1'],
['_trackPageview'],
['b._setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-2'],
['b._trackPageview']
);
I wanted to thank you for this wonderful read!! I absolutely enjoyed every bit of it.
I have got you book-marked to check out new things you post…
Hi Avinash,
Depending on which analytics package I refer to, I get a radically different bounce rate. In GA, the bounce rate is 52% higher than in Coremetrics causing the executives some concern over which is right.
Do you know how each calculates bounce rate and why there should be so much of a discrepancy?
Matt: The standard Digital Analytics Association definition of Bounce Rate is "visits with only one hit recorded." That is what pretty much all Web Analytics tools measure.
As to why GA and Coremetrics are different, please work with the respective vendors (or a consultant, here's a list: http://www.bit.ly/gaac) to figure out.
You are also welcome to check this out: The Ultimate Web Analytics Data Reconciliation Checklist
-Avinash.
We focus heavily on SEO for our clients and bounce rate is something that comes up frequently when discussing SEO with clients.
We feel making sure that the visitor stays on the site comes down to many factors such as design, usability and content.
Thanks for the information. Very much needed as I have got a Blog with high bounce rate. My blog How-To Tech Guru has the following stats in the last 1 month:
Visits:17,467; Unique Visitors:16,435;Pageviews: 21,605; Pages / Visit:1.24
Avg. Visit Duration:00:00:42; Bounce Rate:88.26%; % New Visits:93.69%
My blog is now 6 months old and have got around 160+ small How-To articles which I have written in my own Indian English. To bring down the bounce rate, I tried adding older post links in between articles, you might also like 1 2 3 4 (list of 4 to 6 similar subject articles).. still I see that the bounce rate is in the same state.. of around 87 to 88%. I'm not sure if this is one of the reasons why Adsense rejected my request.
I will try my best to follow the above mentioned points and also.. will go thru' your book. Thanks again.
Ravindra: Here's a post that might help with ideas to reduce bounce rates…
~ Six Tips For Improving High Bounce Rate / Low Conversion Web Pages
All the best!
Avinash.
Bounce rate, design , site structure. it seems it is all of a guess work going on. I have sites with bounce rates ranking much higher than the ones with lower bounce rates.
For sometime i am observing a random pattern in the rankings to confuse the seo companies.
Dan: It is fairly well established that your bounce rate in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or WebTrends has nothing to do with your site rankings in search engines.
You could optimize your bounce rates, you would like to, in order to improve the experience of your website visitors and to make a lot of money. : )
Please see my comment immediately above for a post that might help.
-Avinash.
Hello. I absolutely loved this post :) especially information about Bounce rate.
My website's bounce rate is about 50% at the moment and I start to be worried :/ It was 40% couple of months before and it seems that its value is going up and I do not know where the problem is.
Good article, Thanks for the explanation about bounce rate.
Rgds
Avinash rocks! I love your "I came, I saw, Yuck, I'm out here" statement.
Thank you for this amazing post.
Hi
I have a question on bounce rate.If someone comes to our site and clicks from our site to our blogs which is hosted on different server. would it counts as bounce?
Any help on this question would be helpful as i am not able to find answer any where.
Thanks,
Kalpesh
Kalpesh: Let's look at some scenarios…
If your site is x.com and the click goes to x.com/blog, that is not a bounce.
If your site is x.com and the click goes to xblog.com, that is a bounce – unless you implement cross domain tracking.
You can implement outbound link tracking – just Google it for your tool -, then you can capture the click and it won't be a bounced visit.
Avinash.
Is there any analytic tool that can compare bounce rate and exit rate of one website to another?
Sandeep: Please see my blog post on benchmarking to learn about options to compare Bounce Rates across websites and in an industry (from Competitive Intelligence tools or natively inside Google Analytics):
~ Benchmarking Performance: Your Options, Dos, Don'ts and To-Die-Fors!
The post also had guidance on how to get comparisons/benchmarks for other metrics.
Exit rate I'm afraid is a terrible metric. Except for highly structured experiences (say a Checkout), it is unwise to use it.
Avinash.
The bounce rate is the easiest one to understand, but once you start digging into page-level and source-level bounce rates, studying the visitor flow to see the drop-offs and verifying the exit rates as well… then it gets complicated.
Some metrics may even include the others. One can easily get mixed up, confused.
I'm wondering how bounce rate is calculated when working within a particular subdomain view of a website.
Is it counted as a bounce if a user leaves my subdomain for another portion of our site that's not measured in my "View"?
Lisa: It depends on how your analytics solution is implemented.
Are you 1. tracking your sub-domains as a part of your core website, or 2. separately?
For the scenario you describe… if it is #1 then it won't be a bounce because the sub-domain switch is still a part of the same session, but if it is #2 then it would be a bounce.
How how this tracking is implemented:
~ Tracking Multiple Domains – Sub-domains
Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I find a mismatch in my data and i wanted to ask you if GA is counting Bounce rate differently in Audience Vs. Behaviour –> All Pages. and if so why and what is more current
I have a segment for my Home page or features page or any other Page using exactly match (i.e. for HP it is exactly match /)
Thanks, Ami
Ami: Bounce rate is measured the same way across the tool. I'm not exactly sure what might be happening in your case, but it seems you are comparing landing pages vs all pages reports which do have some differences.
If you want to dig more, please partner with a GACP: http://www.bit.ly/gaac
Avinash.
Great article that gives real clarity and insights into Bounce Rates. Thanks for your suggestions about what to look at/do as a result.
One thing I have experienced is that it is really easy for one's website analytics data to be corrupted by visits from referrals fromrogue bots and crawlers – this problem is not written about much – eventhough it can play havoc with any business owner's or marketer's mental wellbeing.
A consequence of this is that one's data will then show an over-inflated Bounce Rate s most of these bots and crawlers tend to either register as visiting one page or worse still, never visit the website at all.
Thankfully it is quite easy to set up filters to block the data from this type of corruption. I think the first steps when analysing bounce rates should be:
1. Looking at your referral sources to make sure that only data from legitimate referrers are included; and
2. Setting up filters to eliminate spam and only allow legitimate referrers into your data ;
3. Following the steps you recommend to identify and address the reasons visitors are bouncing.
I would be grateful to get your thoughts about this suggestion
Eny: Very good point.
Luckily, most of the modern web analytics tools (like the ones from IBM, Adobe, Google etc.) use javascript to collect data and most bot's don't execute javascript. This takes care of a very large chunk of the problem.
Additionally, all these vendors also keep good track of the robots that might be making mischief in our data by executing javascript, and the vendors proactively filter them out (even before you know what's happening).
On rare occasions, someone will get through and in that case you can filter it out. But, if you find yourself doing this a lot please ping the vendor as they should be catching it and helping everyone's data be cleaner.
Avinash.
I really like that analogy about low-hanging fruit that is mentioned in this blog post.
One of the top tips I can think of right off the top of my head is blog bounce rates. Blogs naturally have a high bounce rate, but people often go to this section of a website first.
By putting a call-to-action on the left side of a blog, you can easily add a little bit of growth to your conversion rate. Sometimes, a call-to-action on the right side of a blog can convert a little bit better, too.
Bounce rate is very big factor, in my thinking, but many just don't look towards factors like this, which can hugely effect a website.
A very high Bounce rate means, Visitors are not getting what they want (not always, but in most cases) and are leaving website to find more content, which also be called as Pogo sticking, if those visitors click on other search results in Google. Indirectly, We may lose our authority as Google will consider our content as worthless and will take down rankings.
So, Bounce rate has lot do, no matter, which niche we are working on, from Blogging to eCommerce, this factors needs to be focused on, if we are really looking to provide good user experience.
Atinder: I do recommend solving for your User/Visitor/Customer first. That is most important for your business.
Then, solve for search engines. If you do the above, in most cases we don't have to worry about the search engine.
Avinash.
Hi,
So based on the definition I always struglle with the bounce rate on 'Page path level 2' .. when we're talking about single page visit exits … what does bounce rate say on a page which is visited after the first click? Do we stretch the definition and does that mean the exits after 2 clicks?
Would love this clarified, I can't find any documentation on this :-)
Tnx
Jaspert
Jaspret: You can create a segment quite easily that will only show sessions with two pageviews. Then you can apply that segment to any report you want (Geo, Traffic Sources etc.) and get the insights that you desire.
This of course works to create any definition you want for bounce rate for yourself. :)
Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I know this is a rather old blog post but t I would like to thank you for all your valuable insights you provide in your various articles. I was able to reduce the bounce rate for my B2B SaaS website from 68% to 30% and increased the conversion rate from 1,6% to 8,7%.
I never thought that was possible with some rather simple changes. We didn't change a single sentence on the entire website – we just restructured the content and the menu and simplified the contact forms.
It's really amazing to see how much can be achieved by rather small changes. Thank you so much.
Thanks Avinash for an amazing and insightful article on bounce rate!
I work for a web personalization startup and responsible for analytics for our travel destination clients. We primarily serve content on the homepage could be a Hero image or an overlay campaign. I have often noticed that for few of our clients; when I select a custom segment and review the landing page metrics, bounce rate is 0% or <1%.
This is a too idealistic situation where no one bounces. I just want to understand the underlying issues behind it. Could you guide me?
Neharica: I'm afraid that is too good to be true.
You should view any bounce rate under 20% as worthy of investigation. Something's usually wrong.
When you see 0% or 1%, it is usually the case that due to some change in the GA code implementation on your site you are firing the code off twice on page load. This will send two hits at one time, thus making your bounce rate effectively 1% or 0%. This then needs to be fixed to give you your real bounce rate.
Avinash.
Bounce rate is really a big issue to growing a website.
In an earlier time, my site had 70-75% bounce rate which is not very good. After some time i have manage to keep it down and still working on it.
Thank you very much for this informative article.
Do you feel that bounce rate objectives/expectations fluctuate by large percentages across industries?
I would have to imagine that websites with larger dollar items, or products/services with longer buying cycles should expect higher bounce rates.
Andrew: Consider two purposes:
1. What do you do to attract people to your digital existence, and how accurately you do it?
2. Once they are there, what do you want people to accomplish – for you and for them?
Let's say you are selling something for $5 in a B2B transaction. If people come and see just one page and leave, does that cause any victory for your business? Likely not, you want some action (reading more content, buying directly from you on the site, pressing a button for chat or making a phone call). All this now makes it non-bounce (and good business value).
Now, let's say it is something that costs $5 million. You want almost all of the above. If anything you want them to read a lot more content, watch a lot more videos, spend a lot more time on the site because it is a $5 million sale! All this activity will make it non-bounce. The one bit difference will be that they might take longer to buy, no problem, and/or they might buy offline, still ok.
So… Bounce rate is a great initial proxy to detect if your ads are writing checks your website can't cash (bounce!) or if your landing pages are lame (bounce!).
Getting someone not to bounce sadly is not success because a lot more has to happen. But, not bouncing gives you a chance.
Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I have been following your blog on Analytics. We have a blog which shows >80% bounce rate on most of the articles.
Every article is independent. We do have high performing keywords on our blog. It is a decent blog with ~500-1000 words/article and all are well-written articles.The articles are well structured with images and videos.
How do we handle the bounce rate? Average time on page is ~3 min. Could you please help me here? Thank you so much!
Best Regards,
Gayathri: Here's a post with ideas you can use to lower your bounce rate:
~ Six Tips For Improving High Bounce Rate
You can also consider focusing first on the bounce rate for new visitors. Ideally you have micro-outcomes that add value to your business (they will also lower bounce rates).
Avinash.
Hey Alvinash, Thanks for sharing this awesome information mt website bounce rate is 80%. I Hope this article help me reduce my bounce rate.
Hi Avinash,
Thank you for sharing such a nice article about the bounce rate.
I hope your article will help me to reduce my bounce rate.
Great article that gives real clarity and insights into Bounce Rates. Thanks for your suggestions about what to look at/do as a result.
One thing I have experienced is that it is really easy for one's website analytics data to be corrupted by visits from referrals from rogue bots and crawlers – this problem is not written about much – even though it can play havoc with any business owner's or marketer's mental wellbeing.
A consequence of this is that one's data will then show an over-inflated Bounce Rate s most of these bots and crawlers tend to either register as visiting one page or worse still, never visit the website at all.
Thankfully it is quite easy to set up filters to block the data from this type of corruption. I think the first steps when analyzing bounce rates should be:
1. Looking at your referral sources to make sure that only data from legitimate referrers are included; and
2. Setting up filters to eliminate spam and only allow legitimate referrers into your data ;
3. Following the steps you recommend to identify and address the reasons visitors are bouncing.
Breaking out bounce rate per channel gives you a quick way of spotting underperforming traffic sources.
A quick look should be enough to instantly spot potentially problematic channels, and you’ve always got the option to drill in deeper.