Using Web Analytics: Bounce Rate

Posted by George

February 10, 2009

In a previous post, Quick Tip – Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage, I went over how to use web reporting to help in targeting and reporting on your blogging success. When you study your weblog reports, you will be able to harness information to target and tweak your blog for your readers. bounce

Bounce Rate – What is it?

When reviewing your web reports, you can see many things; you can also see something called a bounce rate on your site. This is defined as the percentage of visitors on your site that enter your site on a certain page and don’t visit any other pages on your site.

This is sometimes confused with exit rate, which is the percentage of visitors on your site that leave from a certain page based on the number of visits to that page.

Basically with exit rate, the visitor visits other pages on your site, while bounce rate is where a visitor only visits only the one page.

I will touch more on exit rate in another post in the future.

How Can a Visitor Bounce?

On your site, that particular landing page could be all the information or not the information that visitor was looking for. If it is what that person was looking for, they might go into other pages on your site. However, if it is not what they are looking for and sometimes it is, they just exit on that particular landing page.

Here are a few ways that a visitor to your site could bounce after hitting that initial landing page:

Closing the window or tab your site is loaded in.

Clicking the famous back button on their browser

Entering a new URL into their browser and navigating away from your page.

Bouncing via a session timeout. When a visitor leaves their browser on that page for over 30 minutes, it will turn into a bounce.

What is a Bad Bounce Rate?

So now that you have an understanding of bounce rate, what would be considered a bad rate?

When you look at your web report, you should take care to look at both the page and site bounce rate. Here are the measurements of bounce rate:

0 – 20% bounce rate is ideal

With a bounce rate of 30% or more should cause you to look closer at those pages.

A bounce rate of 50% or more is something you should be concerned with and look at fixing as soon as you possibly can.

Why Would Someone Bounce?

There are many reasons a visitor would bounce from your site.

On sites that are mostly informational, a high bounce rate may not be a bad thing, sometimes. When someone just wants to find specific information, some will not want to go deeper into the site after they have already found what they are looking for.

Your site may not be in the niche or subject that visitor is searching for. You may post something on creativity, which your visitor searches for, but your site is based on broader subject your visitor may not be interested in.

One big reason can be design and user experience. If you have a site that is very busy and hard to read and follow, they will not stick around. One thing to always look at is how well does your site flow. You should also look at how well your navigation is to read and flows to other pages.

Too many ads on your site would also be considered too busy and unappealing for the visitor.

Where to Go From Here

Now that you know about bounce rate and how important it is, keep a close eye on your web reports. This is the simplest way to find high bounce rates and what can be done for those pages reporting high rates.

Bounce rates and how they can impact your site is another reason to pay close attention to web analytics and reporting.

Other ways to gather data would be to implement polls, ask questions of potential customers and then analyzing that data will help you in bringing those bounce rates down and your success up!