When it comes to analyzing your marketing efforts, seeing your numbers rising may seem like a good thing. But there’s one important metric that you don’t want to see increase, and that’s bounce rate.
To get a better sense of what bounce rate is, imagine someone has just walked into your business. Instead of looking around at products or interacting with your staff, the person just turns around and walks out. This is a pretty awful scenario that leaves you with a bunch of unanswered questions. Why did the customer leave? What could your business have done differently?
This same type of behavior can happen online too. A “bounce” occurs when someone lands on your website, but instead of engaging with your site or navigating to other pages, the user immediately exits.
So how can you figure out the bounce rate of your website and what’s considered a “good” bounce rate?
If you want to know how many people are bouncing from your website, you’ll need to install Google Analytics. This is a powerful marketing tool that provides you with meaningful data about your website. From the moment you install Google Analytics, you begin to collect data on how people are engaging with your site and how many are bouncing from it.
Unlike a customer who physically visits your store and immediately exits without giving you a reason, Google Analytics gives you insight on why people are exiting.
Once you have Google Analytics installed and data is being collected, you can find the bounce rate by simply visiting the homepage of your Google Analytics’ account. Stats on the number of users, sessions, and your site’s bounce rate will be displayed at the top of the page.
This is your site-wide bounce rate. Google Analytics calculates this rate by dividing the total number of single-page sessions by the total number of sessions across your website. (A “session” is a set amount of time a user interacts with your website.) Since a bounce results in no interactions, Google Analytics counts this as a 0-second session or single-page session.
There really isn’t a set standard of what a “good” bounce rate is. It varies by industry and business goals. For example, a bounce rate of 70 percent for a blog website may be terrific, but for an e-commerce website this could be seen as a red flag. To give you a benchmark, the average bounce rate for most industries can vary from 40 to 60 percent. Here’s a helpful guide of what an average bounce rate can look like for each industry.
While bounce rate may seem ambiguous, it should be a metric you pay close attention to. A high bounce rate of 85% or more could be an indicator that something on your website needs to be fixed to improve user experience. The bounce rate of a specific landing page can tell you how effectively your conversion model is working. Are people completing actions like filling out a contact form or are they bouncing off the landing page completely?
If your bounce rate seems high, don’t get overwhelmed. Bounce rates can vary from website and even by web page. Not sure where to begin? Our team of digital marketing gurus can figure out the cause of your website’s high bounce rate. We can work to lower it by increasing website speed, making improvements to the navigation, and even updating the appearance to retain more visitors.
We know just what it takes to get people to love your website as much as you do. If you’d like to learn more about decreasing your website’s bounce rate or want to figure out what your bounce rate is, get in touch with us.