If you’re wondering what Bounce Rate is, it is the percentage of visitors who after viewing only one page, navigate away from your website.
If you’re wondering why it is important, it shows whether your website is retaining visitors or not. For example, if your average bounce rate is 70%, it means that 70% of the visitors to your website left after viewing the one page they were on.
However, take a moment to review the goals of your website. Most businesses are not concerned with visitors browsing endless pages of content, but rather are focused on them taking calls to action, which could be anything from signing up to a strategy session or downloading an eBook, all of which won’t take visitors to different pages on their website.
As a rule, 25-40% is excellent and indicative of a well built, professionally designed website, 41%-55% is a realistic/average range for most sites,
and 56%-70% may be a cause for concern depending on your goals;
however, anything over 70% is unacceptable.
There is a lot of disagreement on the acceptable bounce rate average. Some people feel that a bounce rate of 20% is high, while others think that 50% is acceptable; but generally the average bounce rate for most sites falls between 40% and 60%. However, a low bounce rate is not always indicative of an excellent website; for example, events, blogs and content based platforms usually exhibit low bounce rates on account of their content value. Professional websites and ecommerce, on the other hand, need to work on their rates and establish an appropriate baseline based on their goals. So, for ecommerce, a high bounce rate, almost always means lost sales.
Before getting alarmed over high bounce rates, you must determine
what the acceptable rate is for your business; which means reading
the numbers meaningfully relative to your goals.
Nevertheless, only you can determine what is acceptable and what is not, by putting the numbers in context with your goals. For example, if your Google Analytics bounce rate for your landing page, which is meant to generate leads, is 60%, that means the other 40% were prospects for conversion. Therefore, if your conversion rate of the 40% was high enough to hit your target, then the bounce rate is not cause for concern.
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Feel free to talk to one of our digital strategists today. We are more than happy to help! Contact us now.
