In your search for a bounce rate definition, what is bounce rate in Google Analytics, bounce rate vs exit, and how to improve bounce rate you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, our top CRO specialists reveal answers to all of these common bounce rate-related questions and provide you with quick tips oh now to decrease the bounce rate for your website.
What is a Bounce Rate?
Here’s a simple Bounce Rate definition:
Bounce Rate is a percentage of website users who visit a webpage and then leave, without visiting any other page on your website.
Say a visitor goes to a popular article on your Blog page. After finding the information he wanted, the user leaves your website immediately. The number of the same single-page visits on all pages of your website form your total Bounce Rate.
Since you already know what is website Bounce Rate, let’s see how to Calculate the Bounce Rate using the visual formula above.
It’s quite simple – all you have to do is get the number of single-page visits (those sessions that ended after the user visited only a single page) and divide it by the number of all visits within a certain period (say, a month) on your website.
Easy-breezy, right?
Let’s see our beloved Bounce Rate explained in terms of Google Analytics.
What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
It’s quite simple to define Bounce Rate in Google Analytics, as it carries the same Bounce Rate meaning we explained above, just with a more complex procedure.
What does that mean? You see, Google Analytics defines a Bounce as a single request to the Google Analytics server, such as visiting a single page on your website, and then exiting without performing any other additional actions.
That means if they pressed “Play” to watch a video on that single page, or shared a post with someone, or logged in, or clicked “Read more” to access a bigger portion of the content – Google Analytics will not count it as a Bounce, even if the user only visited a single page.
To be counted as a Bounce in Google Analytics a session must consist of a user entering a page and then exiting without interacting with the elements of the website. At all.
Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate
After we’ve determined what is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics let’s get to the fun hot topic – what is the difference between Exit and Bounce Rates?
Well, first thing first, they sound quite similar and at first glance quite easy to confuse. And they often are.
As you can see from our beautiful visualization below, Bounce Rate is a single-page visit where the user leaves a website right after visiting this one page, without interacting with the website’s elements in any way. Visitor comes and leaves – that’s a Bounce.
If the user comes to your website, and after the first page goes to another one, therefore visiting a multitude of pages, and then leaves the website – that’s an Exit.
From this point of view each and every one of website pages are exit pages, so why bother counting in the first place?
Well, here’s the deal. Exit Rates get counted for a specific page, not for a whole website. They are used to determine how people exit from each page specifically, meaning that some pages, like homepages, for example, are less likely to increase your Exit Rates, but Blog pages are.
The more people leave from a certain webpage, the higher its Exit Rate.
What is a good Bounce Rate?
So, the common viewpoint on Bounce Rates is that they are bad. Like, a leather jacket and drinking Glen Mckenna at 11 am in the morning bad. Will bring your daughter by midnight but returns her 3 days later with a belly button piercing bad. You get it.
But, it turns out even the bad guys have a soft side and a stack of Adele CDs hidden in the back drawer, along with Bounce Rates which are not as bad as they seem. To be honest, it all depends on your website. Here’s how the bounce rate is explained.
The average Bounce Rate among all websites is about 40 percent. If you have a Blog, which mostly provides news and articles to your readers, the average Bounce Rate for your website will be around 70-90%.
In this case, users have searched for the specific topic, found what they looking for and left after reading the requested piece of information. The main point of the Blog has been completed. The more readers you have, the more successful your Blog is and the more you earn from placed ads and other forms of monetization.
Now the average Bounce Rate for Ecommerce websites is quite different. Here your point is to sell, wherever you offer blog articles, free content or subscriptions, you have to sell your product and that’s all that really counts. Good Ecommerce Bounce Rate is around 10-30%, which is quite a different number from that o the Blog, right?
The true answer to “What is a good Bounce Rate?” is it depends on your website type, your goals and sales method. But regardless of what you offer, it’s always a good idea to figure out how to improve Bounce Rate, which we will touch upon in the next section.
How to improve the Bounce Rate?
Here’s the deal: the Bounce Rate you currently have might be just fine for you, but for Google Search Console – not so much. You see, Google algorithm actually ranks pages according to the Bounce Rates, and favour those pages who’s visitors prefer to stay longer.
Which means you’ll need to work on improving it as long as your website exists, and can start by reading these short tips on how to reduce Bounce Rate:
- Make your pages minimalistic. Remove unnecessary distractions in the form of sidebars, sign-up forms, and clingy pop-up windows.
- Increase your font size. Honestly, nobody likes to get out his monocle.
- Make it load fast. Visitors usually leave to another page after a 10-second wait.
- Be relevant. If you’ve inserted a bunch of keywords on your page (yeah, you know who I’m talking about) but have no actual content or one that does not correspond with your page title and description people are not going to like it one bit.
- Utilize internal linking. Place links to other articles, to other pieces of content, to the ways of contacting you – this will increase the likelihood of them staying.
• Contact InsightWhale and we’ll improve your website’s Bounce Rate for you 😉
Conclusion
Bounce Rates are important. Without them, it’s really hard to calculate which pages on your website are doing great, and which – not so much. On top of that calculating Bounce Rates provides you with insights on how well your website retains visitors in general.
To improve your Bounce Rates contact us – helping people increase their sales is exactly what we do. Is exactly what we love doing. Call us, pretty, you know you want it 😉
