hear this question many times from my clients who are using Google Analytics as part of their website tracking strategy. They notice the term “bounce rate” in their stats and wonder exactly what it is and what it means to them.
Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com sent an email newsletter this morning that shed a lot of light on the subject. We’re going to cite his reasons for how a “bounce” occurs, then elaborate on what it means to your website and your business.
First, what IS a “bounce”? A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and then leaves without going beyond the page they landed on. For instance if someone visits your site, lands on the home page, then immediately leaves, that’s a “bounce.”
A “bounce” can be caused by many things. A few of them, outlined in Daniel’s newsletter are:
- The visitor hit the “Back” button on his browser.
- The visitor closed his browser.
- The visitor clicked on one of your ads.
- The visitor clicked on one of your external links.
- The visitor used the search box on his browser.
- The visitor typed a new URL on his browser.
What this means is that your visitor likely did one of the above things after arriving on your website and before clicking through to another page on your site.
The formula for figuring your bounce rate is:
BR = B/V, where
BR = Bounce Rate
B = Bounces (visitors that leave after viewing only one page)
V = Total number of visitors to your site
So what is a “good” bounce rate and what is a “bad” bounce Rate?
That’s usually the 2nd question I get and the answer requires a bit of explanation.
Acceptable “bounce rate” levels depend on the type of website you have. For a multi-page site with lots of information, a 75% bounce rate might be considered “bad.” But for a single page sales letter, a 75% bounce rate would be fantastic.
In general, a 40%-65% bounce rate would be considered “good.”
If you have a general interest website with lots of pages and information and your bounce rate is very high (85%-95%), there is something about the site that is driving visitors away as fast as they arrive.
That is not good and it needs to be analyzed and corrected quickly. There’s not much point in spending good time and money attracting traffic that doesn’t even read what’s on your site.
There are a lot of things you can do to lower your bounce rate. Here are a couple examples from my own experience.
I have a number of websites that offer video tutorials on how to use (mostly) Open Source software. The theory is that the software might be free to use, but it doesn’t do anyone much good if they can’t use it effectively.
We’re going to take a look at two of those sites.
The first is EZKompoZerVideos.com. When I first placed this website into operation, it was a simple one-page sales letter, with a link to an off-site page for affiliate sign-up.
After a few months, it was making sales, but had a bounce rate of 96.7%. There was a sample video on the main page. Then, I merely added a second page and moved the video to it – with a link from the main page. Since then, my “bounce rate” has come down to 76%. Better, and not bad for a website that just consists of a sales page, but think we can do better.
A few months ago, I started up the website at KompoZerTutorials.com. It’s the same content as the original site, but has been broken into 8 pages, with some content added to the new pages – but it is still essentially just a sales letter. I used Joomla! to host the pages and set up Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs.
This page has a “bounce rate” of just 60%. That’s a HUGE difference from the 96.7% “bounce rate” of the sales letter site of one, single page.
You can lower your “bounce rate,” too. Watch these pages for more on how to do just that.
Need professional help with your bounce rate? or, don’t know what your bounce rate is? Visit the professionals at OrangeCat.com and keep more of those visitors on your site and reading your information – which of course leads to sales.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bob Stovall, Brad Simmons. Brad Simmons said: What is Bounce Rate? What does it mean to you? http://bit.ly/deBOoc [...]
[...] only one page. They can “bounce” for any number of reasons (for more, see the blog post What is Bounce Rate? What does it mean to you? on BobStovall.com. A decent bounce rate could be anywhere from 33% to 67%. Some one-page sales [...]