Bounce rates

Posted: 28 July 2009

One of the simplest, yet often misunderstood metrics in website analytics is the 'Bounce Rate'

The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits to your site that consisted of just one pagehit. The visitor arrived at a page, and that was it. No further clicks.

The tricky part is deciding whether a high bounce rate is good or bad. And to determine that you need to think about why you want people to come to your site. If you have an ecommerce site, where you want people to buy things, and to buy they will need to click through at least one page, then a high bounce rate is a bad sign. (But if it's an ecommerce site you probably want to be measuring the transactions themselves too.)

However for many sites, that are purely informational - say brochureware sites describing an organisation, or listings sites - a high bounce rate may well be a good sign. Think of it from the visitor's perspective. They've done a Google search and a page from your site has been thrown up in the search results. They click on it, see the information they need, and... well, that's it, they're happy. A successful visit, yet one which is counted as a bounce.

And this will happen more often than you'd imagine. Many, many visits to websites are to find the organisation's contact details, so they can phone them or post something to them. And if you have that information prominently on the foot of each page, they won't need to go clicking around trying to find it.

So if you can't simply say that a low bounce rate is good, what's the point of it? Well, for any particular site, it's worth watching the trend over time, as rapid changes in it can point to issues which need more investigation. For example, you may find that you have unexpectedly been included in the search results for some new keywords, but the pages people land on are not as clear as they could be - so your bounce rate increases.

Ultimately, the bounce rate is just one of hundreds of metrics available in tools like Google Analytics: they all have their uses, but often need to be viewed together to get any meaningful understanding of your visitors.