So you’ve heard the term Bounce Rate. But what does that actually mean and what causes it? A bounce rate can be caused by many factors, and it doesn’t always call for concern. A high bounce rate usually sounds the alarms that individuals aren’t finding what they’re looking for on your website. A good idea is to view this as an opportunity for improvement.
Higher bounce rates can always be lowered, below are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rate back to more manageable levels.
What is a Bouce Rate? What is the definition?
A bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and then immediately leave without navigating to any other pages.
Is this a bad thing?
Unless a potential customer is only looking for a telephone number or physical address, then this is not bad at all. However, there is a problem when people land on your site, bounce and don’t convert. Sometime when building sales pages or landing pages, the intention is for the customer to call you or download a PDF or fill out a contact form. If this happens then this is still counted as a conversion.
How does analytics calculate Bounce Rate?
Have you ever landed a website from Google and immediately left before navigating to another internal page? If answered yes, then you have a 100% bounce rate on that particular website.
A site’s bounce rate is the percentage of individuals who have landed on your website and don’t browse at all. In short, bonce rate represents single page views only.
The easiest and most common way to find this is through Google Analytics.
Google Analytics has a simple to use interface that will show you the total bounce rate for your website and for each individual page.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool for finding valuable insights about your website. It is also important to look at other metrics in conjunction with another so that you can understand the whole story your website data is telling you. For example, if you notice that your average time on a webpage is high and the bounce rate is also high, it means that potential customers have most likely achieved their goals within your single page and don’t need to navigate further.
Lets look at averages.
Firstly a healthy bounce rates sits somewhere between 27% and 85%, quite a large margin to say the least. If we break it down further…
Excellent – 27% to 45%
Above Average – 45% to 55%
Average – 55% to 85%
Something is not right – 0% to 27%, and 85% to 100%
Whilst this may seem incredible that a bounce rate is lower than 27%, however this generally means that there is something that is broken in your scripts.
What are some important factors?
There are a range of factors that will impact the bounce rate of your website. What are these factors? Let’s take a look.
Mobile Phone traffic.
It’s probably pretty obvious, but mobile visitors will tend to bounce more. If you site has a huge amount of traffic from mobile then you can generally expect a higher bounce rate.
Paid or Social Traffic
If you have invested in paid advertising or social media management and you notice a higher bounce rate, you shouldn’t be too alarmed. This is quite common for most websites. Even though your website visitors will spike, so too will your bounce rate.
Industries
Industries differ and so do their bounce rates, when you compare a website like Wikipedia, or any website containing large amounts of information, users will navigate through. However, websites like blogs will tend to have much, much higher bounce rates as the user tends to read the one page and close the website.
So what can you do to lower your bounce rate?
If you notice that visitors on certain pages of your website are staying for a short duration of time and bounce easily, then perhaps it’s time to change up the design, imagery and content. If you are working hard to drive traffic to your website, then you sure don’t want to be loosing visitors too fast.
Sometimes a website facelift can really help keep users on the page and complete the desired actions you want them to take.
One thing to remember is, people don’t generally navigate to websites by mistake. They are there for a reason. It’s best to do what you can to help eager visitors find exactly what they are looking for.
Interested in talking all things web design? Email our team info@sicurogroup.com.au.
