How to Know When Bounce Rate is Good or Bad

What is bounce rate? Is it always useful to have visitors interact more with your website? Find your answers in this blog.

A high bounce rate may indicate low-quality content, longer page loading speed, and failure to meet the intention of the search query, among other red flags related to a website. But it is not always right. 

Like other analytical metrics in digital marketing, including CLV and CTR, the bounce rate varies from industry to industry. Experts from customedialabs state that an e-commerce site has between 20-45 percent, while it is 25-55 percent for a B2B website. 

Bounce Rate Meaning with Example 

The definition, according to Google, is

“Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the [Google] Analytics server.” 

Here is the formula – 

Bounce Rate = Number of single page visits or sessions / Number of total entrance visits or all sessions

If 60 single-page visitors leave without interaction and there are 100 total visits, the bounce rate would be 60%. 

Common Signs to Identify Bounce

Google describes a bounce via a single-page session. A session’s duration is calculated in seconds. 

And an average session duration goes by the formula 

Avg. Session Duration = Total duration of all sessions in seconds / Number of sessions. 

You must also take note of the default timer when it comes to average session duration. The time duration is 30 minutes. So when the visitor does not interact with the site for 30 minutes, the session times out. 

Other ways to identify the bounce rate include the following. 

• A visitor may click on an outbound link, i.e., clicking on a link that directs them to another website.
• The visitor types a new site on the address bar.
• The browser window is accidentally or deliberately closed.
• The visitor reads the customer support or ‘contact the business’ pages.
• The visitor clicks on the back button on the browser

Bounce Rate Google Analytics Interpretation

When the visitor of your blog or landing page, does not click on any of the internal or external links, the connected Google Analytics server for your website may not get triggered.

There are three main possibilities, among many.

1. There was no user engagement on that respective page. 
2. Another possibility is that you have not set up an event in Google Analytics. You can turn it into an interaction event instead of a non-interaction event. (An event measures the user interaction on a website.)
3. You have not yet created a segment in Google Analytics for your first time visitors. Creating a new users segment gives you an accurate picture of new and returning visitors. 

When is Bounce Rate Good?

You can consider the concept of bounce rate as entirely contextual. 

There can be a high ratio even when the user visits a single page, finds the solution to their pain point, and leave without interacting much. This is common among the help pages of a website. 

Google explains that a high ratio is ‘bad’ when the visitors are only visiting the homepage of the site and not going to other pages. 

Experts from SEMrush mention that an acceptable average bounce rate is between 26 and 70 percent. 

According to a study from siegemedia that calculated 1.3 billion sitewide sessions and the average bounce rate was 50.9%. The same study revealed that the average in the travel industry was 82.6% and in the real estate industry to be 40.8%. Lifestyle blogs have it going more than 90%, but this is normal. 

You can even say that sometimes a high bounce rate is ideal because it indicates that the visitor finds all the information they are looking for and is ready to convert by going to another page. 

Steps to Take to Fix Bounce Rate

These are some proven ways to keep your website performance desirable.

• Improve page loading speed. This is where a technical SEO plays a massive role. Also look into mobile responsiveness. 
• Do a website audit and filter out the pages with the highest bounce rate. Look into the issues existing on that page. It could be the on-page elements, such as meta description, incorrect/irrelevant link, heading, intro, or similar, that need to be fixed.
• Interlink only relevant pages from your own website instead of outbound links. (Also, try interlinking back to the same blog.) 
• Find the correlation between high bounce rates and conversions. If your website has a high bounce rate but is not affecting the conversions, it is a good sign. You should worry when the conversions are going down and the bounce rate is also too high. 
• Separate the new users and returning visitors segments on Google Analytics to analyse who are leaving your page. In general, new visitors leave pages earlier than returning visitors. 
• Try removing the pop-up ads at your backend. Pop-up ads are simply distracting when it comes to user experience. If you are using WordPress as your site, you may look into scanning it using tools such as WordFence and GOTML among others. 

Related: WordPress interview questions

Difference Between Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

The exit rate vs bounce rate debate is also important to know. But they are not too different from each other. 

A bounce rate is when the visitor leaves a single page after landing on it from the SERP, or link from other sources. The exit rate is not dependent on the page after landing. 

The visitor may jump from one page of a website to another and the last page that they leave, contributes to the exit rate. 

Parting Thoughts

This was about bounce rate, in brief. Now you know, this metric cannot be defined as good or bad, but it is a great indicator when some pages of your website require attention.