What Is a Good Bounce Rate and Why Does It Matter?

As you scroll through your Google analytics report you might ask yourself, “What is a good bounce rate and why does it matter?”. A good bounce rate is a key component of a successful website. If your audience isn’t enjoying your content, they won’t return to your website. Bounce rate or the percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing one page is a vital component of web analytics. Web analytics is a service that allows you to measure your website’s performance. Essentially, your bounce rate reflects how well your audience reacts to your content. There are various ways to achieve a good bounce rate and improve conversion rates. This article will discuss tactics to improve and maintain a good bounce rate and explain why it’s a worthwhile investment.

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What Is a Low Bounce Rate?

When reviewing the analytics for your website, you’ll come in contact with metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of people who take an action. For example, a visitor completes a purchase after browsing your catalog. Bounce and conversion rates are important when measuring the success of your website because it communicates how well your content resonates with your target audience. When your bounce rate is low, you’re more likely to have a higher conversion. In other words, a low bounce rate can be a sign that your website is optimized. However; bounce and conversion rates aren’t always correlated and depend on the website and its content.

Highs and Lows

With that in mind, what is a low bounce rate? A general standard is 40% or less. In other words, at most, 40% of your visitors are navigating away from your website after viewing one page. A high bounce rate is considered to be 70% or more. At first glance, 70% of your web visitors leaving your site is daunting. In most cases, this signifies a problem. You may be experiencing high bounce rates for several reasons. It’s best to rectify these issues as soon as possible to maintain your customer’s attention on the site.

Technical Errors

Issues such as slow-loading pages and HTML typos could cause problems. If your visitors are unable to view your content, they’ll lose interest and venture to another website. Additionally, not being mobile-friendly can result in visitors leaving. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile usage, it’s more likely to experience technical and format errors. The best way to combat this is to stay up to date with your website’s maintenance.

Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are small windows that consist of advertisements and email subscribe buttons can turn visitors off from your website. Your visitors must be able to maneuver through your website freely. We aren’t saying all pop-ups are bad, but it’s important to find a balance when implementing this feature.

Poor Content

The key to having a successful website is to have engaging and relevant content. Without this, you’re not giving your audience a reason to stay on your site. It’s important for you to understand your audience as well as cater to them. For instance, if you want to target amateur cooks, you shouldn’t use complex language when describing each step of a recipe. In addition, your content should free of grammatical errors. Lastly, blocks of text should be broken up with imagery. This will help your page be visually appealing and thus more engaging.

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Good Vs. Low Bounce Rate

It’s self-explanatory that the lower the bounce rate, the better your website is performing. Although this may be true, it’s not always the case. We recommend that you aim for a low bounce rate; however, we acknowledge that this isn’t the sole identifying metric for good traffic. To put it clearly, because your website has a higher bounce rate than recommended doesn’t mean your website is performing poorly. There will be situations where the bounce rate will be higher on specific pages. If your website is information-heavy, a visitor may only navigate to it to receive an answer then leave. Typically, websites that are blog or news-focused may experience more visitors leaving quickly as well. To answer the question, “What is a good bounce rate?” The answer is dependent on the website, the content, and the situation.

Examples

For example, if a visitor needs help solving a math problem, they will navigate away from the site once they found their answer. Because the bounce rate on that specific page is high doesn’t mean the page is operating poorly. In this instance, the number of page visitors or people who view a page would be a better measuring tool. However, because this webpage’s high bounce rate is forgivable doesn’t mean there is no opportunity for you to improve your website. Writing a strong call to action or a phrase that influences a response can transform a high influx of page visitors to website subscribers. Let’s borrow the math problem example. If the webpage that explains how to multiply fractions invites a visitor to visit another page or establishes itself as a good source of information, the visitor may return. In this capacity, this tactic can increase the traffic to your website.

What Is the Average?

How does average bounce relate to this? This is what is seen as the normal range among all sites. On average, your bounce rate should be between 40-70% with 40-55% being the desirable range. That being said, an average rate isn’t always good for your website. There are several ways you can improve this to maximize your website’s success.

How to Get a Good Bounce Rate

Now that we know the difference, how do we obtain a good bounce rate? At its most complex, it should be judged on a case-by-case basis. At its simplest, there’s a list of strategies you can utilize to optimize your website and increase its conversion rate.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics or any other web analytic service is a great place to start when improving your site. Understanding how your website is performing will help you draft an action plan. Furthermore, if you know your bounce rate, you can better identify what’s not working in your web design. For example, if certain pages have higher bounce rates than others, you know the error is only present on those pages.

Improving Content

We already touched on how poor content can negatively affect your bounce rate, but there’s more to curating good content than making it relevant, grammatically correct, and visually appealing. Including videos in addition to blog posts can break up large blocks of text and make your website more accessible. For example, embedding videos onto your website will cater to an audience who can’t read an article. Furthermore, videos deliver large amounts of information in a short period of time. In this capacity, you are offering dynamic content efficiently and concisely.

A Better User Experience

The user experience is one of the most important components of web design. If your visitors aren’t happy, they won’t return to your website and more of them will leave quickly. To ensure your visitors’ experience is a positive one, your website needs to be accessible and informative. This includes properly functioning web pages, easy navigation, and fast web page load speed.

Call to Action

It’s important to realize that a strong CTA is crucial in improving your bounce and conversion rate. View a CTA as a final sale to a customer where you persuade them to subscribe to your website. The lack of a CTA might be the roadblock keeping you from having a good bounce rate. When writing a strong CTA, you should use action verbs, be creative, and employ persuasive language. For example, let’s say that we own a website that posts vegan recipes. A strong CTA that prompts a visitor to subscribe to our mailing list could sound like “Subscribe to our mailing list for more Vegan Family Friendly exclusives.”

Why Is This Important?

Bounce rate is an important metric to pay attention to when measuring the success of your website. Like all visitor tracking, this lets you know how your visitors are reacting to your content. You should perceive it as a window into your visitors’ minds. If you can better serve your visitors, you can experience more traffic which can lead to more sales and revenue.

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Value in Measurement

Without bounce rate, you can still measure how popular a webpage is through the number of hits it receives. However, visitor traffic only communicates how many people visited a page. The key difference between bounce rate and visitor traffic is that the it tells you when a visitor loses interest. Essentially, it’s beneficial in the editing process of a website. It’s feedback that functions similarly to a survey or a review. While it’s not as direct as a customer review, it’s a guaranteed report of your service. Do you have more questions about Google analytics, and SEO strategies? SEO Design Chicago offers an assortment of services that will help you improve your business’s SEO. Visit our website and schedule a consultation with us today.

FAQs

  • What is a bounce rate?
  • Why is my bounce rate so high?
  • How can I lower my bounce rate?
  • What is an average bounce rate?
  • Is a high bounce rate bad?

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