Will Hardison

I came, I threw up, I left. Understanding website bounce rates

First off, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, do that now. If you need help installing it, I will be happy to help you (will@mediaplug.biz) There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be measuring the amount of visits to your site/blog and drawing conclusions for improvement.

Inside of Google Analytics (and most other analytics programs) is a metric labeled “Bounce Rate”. No, this isn’t how many times someone watched the “Can I get a What What” video by Jay-Z on your website. It’s the amount of people who simply came to your website, in theory did absolutely nothing, and left. The bounce rate is shown as a percentage. A 65% bounce rate means that 65% of your visitors came, threw up, and then left.

What is a good bounce rate?

A “good” bounce rate depends on several factors: traffic sources, type of website, calls to actions, and your own acceptable conclusions.

Traffic Sources: Bounce rate depends on traffic sources like direct traffic, referrals (other websites like twitter, facebook, linkedin, and partners who post your link), and SEO.

SEO should provide the lowest bounce rates given the point that visitors are searching for your product/service and finding your website. If your most popular keywords are proving to have the highest bounce rate, you have a bit of a problem. You can’t have people leaving left and right on your best keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the bounce rate based on referrals from my blog (willhardison.com) to my company’s website (mediaplug.biz).

As you can see only 16% percent of people coming from my blog (keep in mind this blog collected dust for months before 10 days ago) to my company’s site bounced. I personally feel that 16% is pretty good bounce rate. They also spent an average of 2 minutes on my company’s site and viewed about 4 pages (pretty much every page of my site).

Type of Website: A blog should have a lower bounce rate than a landing page selling a product simply due to the fact that there’s more content on a blog to explore.

Calls To Actions: Take a look at the first sentence of my blog post. I tell you to go install Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already. If you click on the “Google Analytics” link you will be considered a bounce. So keep in mind what you are asking your visitors to do on your site.

Your Own Acceptable Conclusions: Percentages, ratios, and measurements are just numbers. You must draw your own conclusions based on the data. If I tell you that a terrible bounce rate according to industry standards  is 41% and above, but you’re making thousands off of a site that has a 53% bounce rate, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Have you noticed that I haven’t mentioned any actual figures of what constitutes a good bounce rate? That’s because I believe it’s a personal decision and conclusion as to what a good bounce rate is for YOUR website. You’re not going to win over everyone, so don’t run yourself ragged trying to lower your rate from 35% to 31%.

Now, it’s Monday, so I say you kick the week off with a little Jay-Z.

Tags: bounce rate, google analytics, mediaplug, website, will hardison