High bounce rate = rubbish website?
Avinash Kaushik, author of Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, has often blogged about the best ways to measure the effectiveness of web pages. He once wrote, “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis based on my experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for."
Many others have used these percentages as a benchmark for their own websites, but if you want to measure your website’s performance accurately, it’s important to understand what bounce rate rate really means. Because the truth is, bounce rate can be very misleading.
What Exactly is Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate of your website’s analytics is the percentage of people who land on a page of your site and leave your website from the same page. This is often measured within a certain period of time and with most analytics tools, it’s around 30 minutes. So a bounce can be recorded if:
a) A user lands on a page and leaves your site from the same page within 30 minutes.
b) A user lands on a page and their browser is idle for 30 minutes.
So essentially, your bounce rate measures the percentage of web users who do not click through to another page of your website. So the higher the bounce rate, the less effective the page? Some may have believed that to be true in the past, but it’s not always so.....
Bounce Rate Isn’t a Useful Measure Alone
Let’s take a look at a few scenarios where you may be recorded as a “bounce” in web analytics tools.
1. What if you used the query “best cure for cold and flu” in Google and landed on a great health blog? If you obtain great tips and remedies for about ten minutes then leave the site, does it mean the content wasn’t effective?
2. What if you found a fantastic driveway cleaning service, loved the price and customer service guarantees and decided to email the company direct? Does that mean the page wasn’t effective?
3. What if you came across an entertaining short story and decided to share it on Facebook and Twitter, but clicked away from the site? Does that mean the website didn’t do its job?
None of the above would suggest that you have an ineffective website, so it’s important to look at the other factors. Gauging bounce rate alone isn’t a fair representation of your website’s success.
Look at Bounce Rate and Entrance Source
If you want to delve deeper into bounce rate, it’s a good idea to analyse bounce rate and entrance source. The way that a web user is referred to your site can be highly influential to your bounce rate and the more relevant the search query, the more likely that user will find value in your content.
To fine tune your bounce rate, applying good SEO with in depth keyword research to each article is critical.
You will also notice varying bounce rates from different sources such as direct visits, organic searches, social networking sites and other website referrers. Naturally, you may find that direct visitors have a very low bounce rate and organic searches produce a slightly higher bounce rate.
Understanding Industries and Browsing Patterns
Industries, market sectors and niche topics will all vary and it could be normal for your website to have a high bounce rate if that’s the nature of your business / area of expertise. Blogs tend to have high bounce rates because people search for information and leave whereas e-commerce sites want people to shop around.
Hotels typically have low bounce rates as people are likely to look around for more information and hotel pictures if they are thinking about booking. This doesn’t mean that they like the website, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they will call and book.
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