The bounce rate is one of the indicators to measure the success of your marketing campaigns, it is a KPI that goes hand in hand, for example, with the average time on the page.
Bounce rate is a surprisingly complicated metric to define and track. The concept is quite simple: people come to a web page, do not interact and bounce.
What is the bounce rate?
Bounce rate indicates the percentage of users who viewed your page and exited without triggering an activity, such as completing a form submission or requesting a demo.
This means that certain parts of your website, such as your blog and other top-of-funnel content pages, will naturally have a higher bounce rate than the rest of your website. You may want to segment or filter such pages when analyzing your website’s overall bounce rate.
This is the formula:
Bounce Rate = Unique Interaction Sessions / Total Sessions
Google Analytics measures time as the interval between interaction events or engagement impacts. This means that it also measures bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that do not record more than one interaction success.
Is a high bounce rate a bad thing?
No. A low bounce rate is not necessarily a good thing either: bounce rates below 20% almost always indicate duplicate tracking codes or incorrect event tracking.
Sometimes the bounce rate is not the best metric to measure the “success” of a website.
Especially for blogs, journalism websites, success is measured by the percentage of people who get the exact information they are looking for.
They visit a page, read the information they need, and leave satisfied, all while increasing your bounce rate!
So it would be better to measure the percentage of new website visitors, returning users (aka loyal readers), average time on page, and scroll depth.
How High Bounce Rates Affect You and What to Do About It
An extremely high bounce rate (over 90%) could mean that your website is impossible, or infuriating, to use. And you don’t want website visitors to leave with a disgusted feeling.
Review your website’s design and user experience, ensure compatibility across browsers and devices, and insert links or CTAs for visitors to follow.
High bounce rates, between 70% and 90%, are a sign that you need to make your CTA more compelling. This is particularly important if conversion is your number one goal.
Identify the cause of high bounce rates: is your text not making an impact on your target audience, is the quality of your web traffic poor, are annoying pop-ups shortening the session? Address these issues to reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate.
How to reduce the bounce rate of your website?
First of all, your description must correspond to what can be found on your site. If the visitor does not find the topic of your meta description, he will be disappointed and will instantly leave your site, which will increase your bounce rate.
Furthermore, it is essential to analyze the behavior of your potential customers. What page did they arrive and leave the session on? If customers leave your home page without visiting another page on your site, it is possible that your site is not optimized for user experience: therefore, you should improve the ergonomics of your site or your loading time and propose a menu or links that allow the visitor to find the objective of their visit. To improve your site’s loading time, you can remove the heaviest elements from your page or compress them.
Visitors may have abandoned your site due to a lack of information, so you should optimize your page content to make it more informative and relevant.
You can also link your pages to encourage the user to visit your different content. Don’t hesitate to integrate calls to action, such as the “learn more”, “read the full article” buttons… It’s up to you to imagine the most creative ways to make your website indispensable.
How to monitor your bounce rate
You can have a marketing dashboard that allows you to have this and other important indicators for your business in the same space. You can have your data from Google Analytics, Semrush, social networks, etc. connected, which will allow you to view all that information at a glance and make decisions in time.