Marketing bounce rate is a web analytics metric that shows the number of visitors leaving your website. It counts users who looked at one page and did not want to go to other sections, click anywhere else and, of course, didn’t leave an application.

Of course, most people accept a simple formula: a high bounce rate = end to successful ad launches, projects, businesses. But let’s take a breath and think about how fatal this whole thing is? And in general, what is the bounce rate really and how to evaluate it correctly, what rate is normal and when is it not?

Bounce Rate or BR is the percentage of one-time visits to a website, in other words, this is when the user visited the page, and then left and disappeared without a trace. The user also did not leave any traces of themselves, such as a completed subscription, an application, or even an angry review. Basically, such one-time visits come straight from the search results.

What can the bounce rate indicate?

The bounce rate helps evaluate the quality of the content – whether the user was able to find what they were looking for on your site. In this regard, we can conclude that the higher the bounce rate, the more difficult things are with engagement and conversion.

But this conclusion is not a hard and fast rule without exceptions, and with the lion’s share of refusals, everything is not at all clear. For example, on Google, this metric doesn’t take into account the time spent by the visitor on one page. After all, it may be that the user immediately went to the required page, saw the answer to their question and left the site satisfied. But one way or another, this user will end up on the bounce list. So there is no need to blindly take bare bounce rates into account.

This metric may also be high for pages with an application form or contact pages. Those who set out to find, for example, only some contacts, will simply leave the site immediately, as soon as they copy them. It makes sense.

Also, do not forget that a high bounce rate for landing pages is quite normal, since their goal is to sell/advertise, and not to attract the user to the site as much as possible and keep them on it.

How is bounce rate calculated in Google Analytics and other metrics?

When calculating your bounce rate in Google Analytics, always keep in mind the profile of your site and the purpose of the user visiting your page. For example, for media resources and marketplaces, these goals will be diametrically opposed.

The bounce rate is also influenced by the vertical and, of course, the type of devices from which the user accesses the resource.

Analysts do not sit idly by and they ran an analysis of 10,000+ sites in the public domain and it allows us to draw some conclusions:

–   Blog sites are ahead of the rest in terms of the average volume of failures – here, the average bounce rate can reach 70–90%

–   Various media sites – the average bounce rate remains at the level of 40–60%

–   E-commerce sites – an average of 47% bounced

–   Service sites – the least number of bounced users – 10–30%

Often, bounces come from users accessing the Internet from smartphones (51%). Those who prefer using laptops or desktops are, on average, 6% less likely to be the instigator of annoying bouncing. This fact rather suggests that mobile traffic users are interested in searching for certain information, rather than surfing aimlessly.

Also remember that when taking BR into account, it is important to consider the scale of your business. Websites of top companies will get more bounces than medium and small websites in the same field. The reasons for this are simple:

–   scale (well-known platforms get visited first)

–   large companies hit top search results more often, while small sites have different problems (at least the desire to climb into the top 10 search results by hook or by crook)

An appropriate strategy for working with the bounce rate should begin with determining the average metric, taking into account the subject matter and characteristics of the site. Then try to maintain this average rate and, if possible, improve it.

Why do you need to calculate your Google Analytics bounce rate?

–   With its help, it is easier to assess the quality of your traffic. For example, if the BR coefficient is large plus the volume of traffic from the same source is large, this may indicate that the referral link is not working correctly.

–   The Google Analytics bounce rate will also tell you about user engagement. Of course, there are always exceptions, but if you’re selling information, this can be a telling metric. That is, the reason for the significant volume of refusals may be that users do not find the information they are looking for or they are annoyed that the search is taking too long. And optimization of the bounce rate in this case will be in analytics and development of site usability.

–   BR may also indicate problems with sales, even if you have the impression that everything is fine in reality.

How is the bounce rate itself calculated?

Of course, there is a formula by which this coefficient can be accurately calculated.

Here it is: BR = Tv/ Te*100%

• Tv – total number of single-page visits,

• Te — total entrance visits, visits to the page, from which users further navigated the site (visited the page and then continued to surf the site).

Of course, today, you can find out the bounce rate without all this algebra by using Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrics. But keep in mind that these services have different approaches.

Here’s how Google Analytics counts their bounce rate. Google, for example, will reject any visit to only one page, without taking into account the time spent by the user on this page. So, a user who has not made any further transitions to the site will be a “bouncer”.

But Yandex considers the most important point to be the amount of time the user spent on the page. When a person has spent less than 15 seconds on a website page, this is already regarded by Yandex Metrics as a refusal. Yandex Metrics also does not keep track of any user interactions with content.

Google has the ability to reconfigure the metric by specifying additional conditions so that bounces are taken into account accurately. Let’s say, increase the number of conversions (exclude clicks on the “About the company”, “Services and prices”, “Contacts”, “Submit a request” and other rejected buttons).

However, neither Google nor Yandex will give a reinforced concrete guarantee to your calculations. At the least, they work without taking into account the human factor: for example, the fact that a person can purposefully cheat with visits.

It’s best not to look at isolated bounce rate cases, but to look at them on a large scale: as soon as a tendency for a massive outflow of users after viewing a particular page appears, take note of it. And also, don’t forget to look at the bounce rate along with other metrics – this is the only way the picture will be as objective as possible.

Normal bounce rate: how to understand normal and high rates

Let’s determine the average indicator characteristic of the entire internet. 50-70% is the average; this range is typical for the biggest share of online projects and landing pages. But everything above 70% deservedly falls into the “high failure rate” category. The range of 30-50% is the norm for a failure rate, so to speak, of “four”. Anything starting from 25% and below is an excellent number.

Ratios above 70% most often occur due to non-engaging content, poor readability, long site loading times, or due to marketer errors or incorrect SEO manipulations (for example, key phrases not relevant to the page content).

To achieve a normal bounce rate, you can resort to various adjustments, which we will discuss below. But keep in mind that the effect of these actions won’t be immediately tangible; you will need to wait for some time and monitor trends in order to understand that you have put effort into the problem area.

How to reduce the bounce rate on your website

Speed up page loading

Any user, of course, doesn’t enjoy waiting for the site or its individual elements to load, even for 5 seconds. Rather, they will enter their query again and find the answer on another resource. Even if the user was extremely patient and waited, but some blocks were not fully loaded, then they will switch to your competitor with a 99% probability.

So, checking the site’s loading speed and its visual elements for how heavy-loading they are is a matter of vital importance for business.

Interesting and useful content

Again, high BR and boring content don’t always go hand in hand. But you need to think about how to refine your copies until they are closer to the ideal, from time to time.

And the problem, again, is not always in the usefulness and fascination of your copies, but in their general optimization. Here, in fact, is how we can improve our texts and how to reduce the bounce rate on the site thanks to these 5 ways that work together.

–   Refine the headings for the main key phrases, use keywords that are understandable to the reader and at the same time motivating for clicks.

–   Check the internal linking – everything should open correctly.

–   Natively embed blocks relevant to the topic into the text, which would motivate users to go deeper into the site.

–   Pay attention to the usability of both individual pages and the site as a whole.

–   Call-to-action buttons need to work, be visible, and motivate visitors to click.

Snippet optimization

An irrelevant audience is the first source of unfortunate bouncing. Make sure that when the user already sees the description of the site in the search engine for their request, just by the title and meta-description, they must understand whether your site is suitable for their request or not.

Remove erroneous links

Perhaps there is an excessive bounce rate on the page because the linking on it is all broken or to some linked resource that is irrelevant to the topic. Incorrect external links are calculated using Google Search Console, Xenu, or Yandex.Webmaster. For permanent protection against broken links, you can use the Link Detox service – it analyzes all incoming links and rejects low-quality ones.

Let’s also say you found inappropriate backlinks that provoke BR. How can you reduce the bounce rate on the site in this case? You can ask the owner to remove the link to you from an inappropriate site. In case this doesn’t work out, Google has a service that allows you to block backlinks from indexing – Disavow Links Tools. Yandex does not have a similar tool in the arsenal, so, if necessary, you will have to write to support and ask to disable incorrect links.

Optimizing the mobile version of the site

Not all sites have managed to adapt to smartphones, and this despite the fact that mobile traffic is starting to wildly dominate everywhere.

Here are the most important points for optimizing the mobile version:

–   The content must be watchable, not compressed (so, the page is well adapted to the smartphone screen)

–   The location of the links must be convenient, there should be no problems with clicking on the necessary link

–   The text must be easy to read, the font shall not be small.

Adding a call to action

It may well be that users came to your page for the necessary information, found it and were happy. And if such a person also encounters a motivating call to action, then they may go deeper into studying your site. The main point here is the incentive to continue getting acquainted with the resource.

404 error adaptation

If one of the pages won’t open due to a 404 error, the page needs to be “fixed”. If this page wasn’t unwanted, come up with a funny phrase that would motivate users to click on the link to visit the site during the “fix”.

User-friendly interface and advertising

Yes, it’s convenient advertising – people don’t like a bunch of pop-ups, push notifications, and other extremely intrusive elements. The same goes for the interface.

We took some comments on the topic from a market expert:

1) Evgeniy Selishchev, solo affiliate

I focus more on CR of my transit pages after a test campaign. But if you delve deeper into the analytics, it can help you understand how interesting the transit page itself is for the traffic it attracts. Especially when you test the first screen or, as some call it, “Lead” – Header + Image. The bounce rate will help you understand the optimal option and which one works best. Why isn’t a high bounce rate always a bad thing? I think it’s all relative. With a product approach, the bounce rate will be much lower than with a teaser approach. Let’s say, if we take a product approach and an adult approach to the niche of male virility, and the metrics will be different for the same transit page. And, accordingly, the bounce rate in the adult niche will be much higher. But at the same time, for adult products, we get much cheaper clicks due to the high CTR. And in this case, despite the higher failure rate, the payback will be better due to cheaper traffic. This is just an example. In general, you always need to test it 🙂

Conclusion

The bounce rate can indicate completely different factors: content that is of little use and doesn’t “light users up”, an incorrect landing page structure, untargeted traffic, low loading speed, etc. The range of reasons is wide, so you need to look at BR not in isolation, but together with other indicators and over a certain period of time.