What is a bounce rate?
The term bounce rate describes and measures what percentage of visitors leave your website after only viewing a single page. They don’t take any action such as navigating to another page within your website or clicking on any elements.
Essentially, they land on your website, do nothing else, and then “bounce” away back to Google Search as an example.
Why is bounce rate an important metric?
Knowing your website’s bounce rate is important because it can help you understand your website’s engagement. A high bounce rate can indicate that you aren’t meeting the needs of your website visitors.
By keeping track of your bounce rate, you can take steps to improve it and increase your website’s conversions.
What causes visitors to bounce from a website?
Depending on your website it could be many reasons for your visitors to bounce. Some of which include:
- The website is not relevant to their search intent.
- The website loads too slow and/or has technical issues.
- The design and content is poor and low-quality.
- The navigation and CTAs (Call to Action) aren’t clear.
What is an acceptable bounce rate for my website?
It depends on your website’s purpose and structure.
For example, if your homepage is the first page that visitors should land on and the intention is they should navigate to the rest of your website’s pages (services, products etc.) you shouldn’t have a high bounce rate. A rate of 40% or below is usually expected.
If you have a landing page and its purpose is to collect leads, you can expect a relatively high bounce rate. The average bounce rate of a lead generation page is around 70%.
Bonus: What is an exit rate on a website?
An exit rate is similar to a bounce rate, but there’s a slight difference:
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. The bounce rate is calculated per page.
Exit rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website from a specific page. The exit rate is calculated for the entire website.
If a visitor lands on your homepage and leaves, the bounce rate of your website would be 100%. But, if the visitor lands on your homepage and then visits another page, the bounce rate for the homepage would be 0% and the exit rate for the other page would be 100%.