Bounce Rate: Fact vs. Fiction

Bounce rate is a metric that reveals the number of visitors to your website who leave after viewing only one page. It indicates whether a page is siphoning people through your marketing funnel — or driving them away. Let’s review the ups and downs of bounce rate and how to measure and manipulate yours.

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of total visitors who land on your website and leave without visiting other pages, engaging with your content, filling out a form, making a call, or otherwise interacting.

It refers to the rate at which site visitors leave the same page they landed on without taking any action or exploring additional pages.

Imagine going to a public pool only to watch pool-goers dip a toe in the water— then immediately leave. What conclusions might you draw from that observation?

Similarly, you can use bounce rate to observe behavior and find the pages that aren’t doing you any favors.

If your site visitors only “dip a toe in the water” and don’t dive in further, something’s off and it’s up to you to find out what.

What contributes to bounce rate?

How long would you wait for a webpage to load? According to Google, as page load time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%.

Page speed isn’t the only contributing factor to your bounce rate. Here are some key movers and shakers:

• Page load time: Slow-loading pages can frustrate visitors, causing them to leave before the page fully loads. This is especially critical for mobile users who expect quick access to information.
• Mobile optimization: Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices tend to have higher bounce rates. A site that’s hard to navigate or read on a smartphone will quickly drive users away.
• Content quality and relevance: If the content on your page doesn’t meet the visitors’ expectations or isn’t engaging, they’ll leave. High-quality, relevant content that matches user intent is crucial for retaining visitors.
• User experience (UX): Poor navigation, intrusive pop-ups, and a confusing layout can all lead to a higher bounce rate. A seamless, intuitive user experience encourages visitors to stay and explore further.
• Technical issues: Broken links, error pages, and other technical problems can frustrate visitors and prompt them to leave your site.
• Misleading meta descriptions and titles: If users click on your site from search results expecting one thing and find something else, they’ll likely bounce. Ensure your meta descriptions and titles accurately reflect the content on your page.
• Targeting and audience match: Attracting the wrong audience through poorly targeted ads or irrelevant keywords can increase your bounce rate. Make sure your traffic sources align with your content and audience interests.

By addressing these factors, you can improve your website’s bounce rate. But, what is a good bounce rate?

What is a good bounce rate?

With bounce rate, there’s no one rate to rule them all — it depends on the context of your website, industry, and goals.

Different industries, for example, have different expectations. In general, anything from 20%-60% can be good. However, the ideal rate is usually somewhere between 26%-40%.

Average bounce rate across industries

The average bounce rate for websites varies significantly across different industries. Generally, the average bounce rate falls between 41% and 55%.

However, anything between 25%-40% is considered excellent, while rates above 70% are usually a sign of trouble unless it’s a landing page or blog.

Ecommerce sites

Ecommerce websites tend to have lower bounce rates than other types of sites, typically ranging from 20% to 45%.

This is because their sole purpose is to engage visitors with CTAs, products, and promotions, which often encourages them to take action or explore more pages.

Blogs and content sites

Blogs and other content-driven sites often have higher bounce rates, usually between 65% and 90%.

This is because visitors might find the specific information they need on one page and leave without exploring further.

What is a bad bounce rate?

A very high bounce rate (90%-100%) or a very low bounce rate (0%-10%) is almost always cause for concern.

Top 7 reasons for a high bounce rate

A bounce rate of more than 90% is generally a red flag, indicating that nearly all visitors leave your site after viewing just one page. Here are some potential reasons for such a high bounce rate:

1. The content on your page doesn’t match what visitors are looking for or isn’t engaging. This can happen if your keywords or meta descriptions are misleading.
2. Difficult navigation, pop-ups, poor web design, or a confusing layout.
3. A slow-to-load website, especially on mobile devices.
4. Technical issues like broken links, 404 errors, or other technical glitches.
5. Lack of mobile responsiveness, or a poorly designed mobile site.
6. Poorly targeted ads or irrelevant social media links that attract the wrong audience..
7.  A misconfiguration in your tracking code or analytics setup can incorrectly report bounce rates. Double-checking your setup can help ensure accurate data.

Top 5 reasons for an extremely low bounce rate

A low bounce rate (0%-10%) might seem ideal, but it’s almost always a sign that something is wrong. Here’s what too low of a bounce rate could indicate:

1. Multiple tracking tags on your site.
2. Your key events may be set up incorrectly in Google Analytics.
3. Automatic page refreshes or redirects can prevent bounces from being recorded, giving the impression that all visitors are engaging with the content.
4. Third-party plugins or scripts can interfere with tracking codes, causing analytics to report an erroneous bounce rate.
5. If events are set to trigger on page load or other non-interactive actions, they can artificially lower the bounce rate. For example, tracking an event as soon as a page loads will count every visit as an interaction, eliminating bounces.

How to measure your bounce rate

Measuring bounce rate involves understanding how visitors interact with your website and using tools to track their behavior.

Standard bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the total number of entries to your site and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

Tools like Google Analytics 4 are essential for measuring bounce rate, as they provide detailed insights into how users navigate your site.

By setting up Google Analytics and ensuring your tracking code is correctly installed on all pages, you can gather accurate data on how often visitors leave your site after viewing only one page.

If you already have GA4 set up on your site, log into your dashboard to access your data. You’ll find bounce rate metrics here (some report setups may vary):

• Click >> Life cycle (located in the left “Reports Snapshot” sidebar)
• Select >> Traffic acquisition
• View >> Bounce Rate in the far-right column

Once you have your analytics set up, you can analyze the bounce rate on different levels, such as overall site bounce rate, page-level bounce rate, and segmented bounce rate.

• Basic bounce rate formula: Overall site bounce rate gives you a broad view of user engagement. A basic bounce rate formula calculates the percentage of single-page sessions (bounces) out of the total number of entries to the site.
  
• Page-level bounce rate formula: Helps identify specific pages that might be underperforming. It helps determine how often a specific page serves as the sole page visited during a session.
  
• Segmented bounce rate formula: Segmenting your bounce rate by traffic source, device, or user demographics provides deeper insights into which segments of your audience are bouncing more frequently.
  

Bounce rate data is crucial for identifying problem areas and making informed decisions to improve user experience and engagement on your site.

How to improve your bounce rate

The best way to improve a page’s bounce rate is to determine the reason people are bouncing. But, how do you know what to change on a page? Some options include:

Have a mobile-friendly website

Over half of all global web traffic is made up of mobile users! Make sure your website loads properly across mobile devices – including smartphones and tablets.

Prioritize overall design and user experience (UX)

If the problem is site-wide, make sure your site looks visually appealing, trustworthy, and easy to navigate with the proper site architecture.

Don’t kill the vibe

Not only should your design flow, but it needs to load fast and not be interrupted by obnoxious pop-ups or ads.

Test your page speed with GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights to learn more about how to improve your site speed. If you need help with technical SEO enhancements, contact our SEO agency.

Assess your content

Your content marketing efforts are crucial to cultivating a healthy bounce rate. Make sure site content is accurate, informative, and intuitively formatted so users can easily find what they need.

Ensure the organic search terms and ads leading people there create the right expectations and that your calls to action (CTAs) are clear. If your page doesn’t satisfy search intent, users will bounce.

Add points of engagement

Adding media, especially videos, can increase engagement and conversions, prolong dwell time, and much more.

Also include elements that encourage people to get looped into the brand like internal links, social media sharing buttons, and comment sections if applicable.

Change your Google Analytics settings

Play around with your settings and expand your goals to identify uncounted actions being taken.

Perform a technical evaluation

Double-check that your tracking code and tags are correct. Make sure you optimize for usability and mobile.

Use backlink discretion

Always be aware when pursuing backlinks, as a link from an irrelevant site with poor content may result in an inflated bounce rate. Cultivate high-quality referral links from trusted sources with a high authority.

Pro tip: Take advantage of free sites and tools that can help improve things like grammar, readability, and SEO on your site. Ecommerce sites in particular can improve bounce rate by adding reviews, making checkout easy, having clear pricing, and adding exit-intent popups. 

Bounce rate myths: Fact vs. fiction

Let’s go over some of the most popular inaccuracies. We’ll explain what each one gets wrong, and how to avoid falling into these commonly-believed traps.

Myth #1: Bounce rate is just another term for exit rate

Truth: Exit rate and bounce rate are actually very different. And while they seem similar, mixing them up can have negative consequences for your site.

While bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave without interacting, exit rate only measures how many people left the site from each page.

That may not seem like a huge distinction, however, exit rate includes everyone who left from that page, even if they visited several pages and engaged with multiple elements first.

Basically, exit rate doesn’t measure engagement, or lack thereof.

Myth #2: High is always bad and low is always good

Truth: A high bounce rate can indicate a variety of things, positive or negative. Again, it depends on your page’s purpose, among other factors. An unusually low rate can be just as concerning as a high one.

Many neutral or positive factors can increase bounce rate. Ecommerce sites usually have lower rates than online dictionaries because of the purpose of the visit, for example.

Think about it: Someone lands on the page, gets the definition they were looking for, and leaves the site. The page was still successful at giving visitors the answers they were seeking.

Likewise, bounce rates for users on different devices or arriving via different channels will vary.

If your rate is suspiciously low, that may indicate a problem. Perhaps something is wrong with your Google Analytics settings or plugins.

While industry benchmarks aren’t always a good indicator, if yours is radically low, you may be missing data, which can cause its own set of problems.

If you’re immediately presented with an answer when you land on a page, it’s natural to leave once you have it. (Image: Unsplash)

Myth #3: A high bounce rate will tank your Google ranking

Truth: Bounce rate isn’t a Google ranking factor.

Google has stated this fact more than once over the years, most recently in June of 2020. But despite being debunked numerous times since 2008, this myth persists far and wide.

Myth #4: Bouncing means visitors aren’t finding answers

Truth: Actually, as we mentioned above, it’s often quite the opposite.

People make various assumptions about the cause of the high rate. Many believe it indicates that visitors aren’t finding answers.

But if you’re immediately presented with an answer when you land on a page, it’s natural to leave once you have it.

Others see it as proof that their site or content sucks. While a high bounce rate is common on sites with this issue, that’s not the only cause.

This belief is often exacerbated by the related misconception that “bounce” means visitors left within seconds of arrival, despite bounce rate being different from dwell time, which actually measures session length.

Myth #5: A site-wide revamp is the only way to improve bounce rate

Truth: There are many ways to lower your bounce rate.

Firstly, since bounce rate doesn’t equate to a bad site, site-wide changes are often unnecessary. Sometimes a few pages lower the site’s overall rate. Fixing them can improve it.

More importantly, Google Analytics measures bounce rate based on your goals and what you count as engagement. If you only count additional page views, your rate may be unnecessarily high.

Viewing multiple pages isn’t the only way users engage, though. Other factors like social sharing, likes, comments, and joining email lists are all highly beneficial forms of engagement.

Bonus: Bounce rate vs. engagement rate

A site’s bounce rate and engagement rate reflect different aspects of user interaction. Bounce rate indicates a lack of engagement or relevance.

Engagement rate measures the level of interaction users have with your content, often calculated based on actions such as page visits, crawl depth, clicks, comments, or time spent on the site.

While a high bounce rate suggests that users are not finding what they need or are quickly disinterested, a high engagement rate indicates that visitors are actively interacting with and exploring your content, reflecting a more positive and involved user experience.

Have more website performance questions? We’d love to answer them!

The takeaway

While bounce rate is important, there’s no hard and fast rule for ranking. It’s more of a range to keep in mind that helps you find problem pages throughout your site.

While it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your bounce rate, don’t lose sleep over it.

As long as you’re showing up in relevant SERPs and have a fast site that’s easy to navigate with high-quality content, you should be in good standing.

Are you ready to understand the ups and downs of your website? Get in touch with one of our SEO agents.

This post has been updated and was originally published in June 2021.