What Is A Bounce Rate And What Is A Good Rate?


What is Bounce Rate and How to Improve It?
People visit your website for different reasons and they come from different sources. Bounce rate is when someone visits a page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. Bounce rate is used to measure how many visitors leave the page without performing any action like buying, clicking on a link or filling out a form.
The definition of bounce says, ‘To move quickly back from a surface after hitting it’. Google defines bounce as a single-page session. The formula used to calculate the bounce rate in Google Analytics is the number of single-page sessions divided by the total number of sessions.
Bounce / Sessions = bounce rate

What is the good bounce rate for your website?
To understand the good bounce rate for your website you will have to learn about the high bounce rate and the low bounce rate.
A high bounce rate means the user’s duration of the session is short. The users are visiting your website and leaving. A low bounce rate means the visitors are visiting your website and spending time on it and clicking the available links.
According to Google, a high bounce rate is bad if your website depends on viewing more than one page. If you have a single-page site like a blog or content where single-page sessions are expected then a high bounce is perfectly normal.
For example, if you see an eCommerce website where the homepage may have the highest bounce rate because you want the visitors to stay on the landing pages so that they can make a purchase.
You should optimize for bounce rate because you are creating content to engage the users. A site wide bounce rate of below 50% of total sessions is considered good. A bounce rate closer to 80% means you need to optimise your website to bring in more sessions. An optimal bounce rate would be in the range of 26% to 40% range.
Improving your bounce rate
To lower your bounce rate, you should consider what can negatively affect it. The following strategies will help you to decrease your bounce rate and drive more engagement to your website:

- Create relevant content like an in-depth guide that will keep your target audience engaged.
- Everyone exists in a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Use tools like Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse Audits to test if your website is meeting the SEO standards. To improve your website speed you can use a CDN, minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript and remove any unused code.
- Internal links are used to signal the hierarchy of your site to the search engines and build topic clusters. Use SEO to reduce your bounce rate.

- Using Google Analytics, find the pages with the highest exit volumes. This will help you find the page people often abandon on your site, who is directly landing on the exit page and who are coming from another page on the website. You can make changes to improve your bounce rate.
- Check the time-on-site metric to know if the problem is site wide or just on a particular page. For example, if you have a blog page with a high bounce rate and a low time-on-site, then you know that the content is not going to work.

- Use A/B testing to find out how your improvement strategies are working. Create different sales pages for Page A and Page B. Show Page A to half of the visitors and show Page B to the other half. Compare the results to find out which page keeps the audience engaged.
- Optimise your website for mobile as the number of mobile users is increasing. You should use a good website design for such users and also your website should load quickly.
- Make your page readable by using subheadings, larger font size, white space, shorter paragraphs and more.

- Once you have strong and optimised content on the page, you need to place your CTAs. Use clear and well-placed CTAs. Using too many CTAs will confuse the users and may not work. Choose the appropriate size, color and size of the CTAs.
- If your meta descriptions, meta titles and the content on the page do not match then the visitors will bounce. Use keywords in meta descriptions and deliver content as promised in the meta description to get a winning page. Target high-value keywords and deliver relevant content.
- Monitor and measure the performance of your website regularly. Use Google Analytics for this. You can hire the best SEO agency to help you reduce your bounce rate.
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