Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Typically integrated marketing and communication professionals will agree that bounce rate is the metric that will tell you how the site is performing as it relates to user experience. Unfortunately we can’t always tell why bounce rate may be high because there are so many different reasons. Sometimes the reasons can even be good because high bounce rate isn’t always the result of having poor content. In fact, it may be just the opposite: if your content was exactly what visitors were looking for, they may not feel the need to continue on to another page on your site.  

In order to more closely view what visitors are “bouncing” from we can look at things like breadcrumbs which uses horizontally arranged links that show visitors where they are located in your navigational structure. Websites never want people bouncing off their site because they feel they can more easily find the content on another site. From a search engine optimization standpoint there are many steps that can be taken to cut down on bounce rate. An obvious one would be to have a good understanding of keywords and good audience insight to understand where traffic is being generated from. Improvements to title tags and meta description tags, the text that shows up in search engine results, will improve your bounce rate by making sure people who aren’t interested in your site never click through to it, and those that do click on search engine results find what they expect to find. 

It is important to remember that a bounce rate may just be the result of good content. A study published by Blue Corona marketing agency interviewed web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik who defines a bounce as, “I came; I puked, and I left.” The natural implication is that high bounce rates are bad – that the content on your site didn’t match what the visitor was looking for so they left without viewing another page. 

Most people can relate to this experience like getting sent an email from a friend with link that urges you to check it out. If this link contains something you aren’t interested in you will immediately close the browser and move on with your day. If everyone that received the email did that same thing, it would technically be a 100% bounce rate.

Because most of the information we will be looking at over the course of the semester will be in the web analytics tool, it is important to see what Google defines bounce as. 

There are a few ways that Google calculates a “bounce” on your site:

• Your viewer closes the tab your site is on or they close the browser completely.

• The viewer clicks the back button in the browser.

• The viewer clicks an external link from your site.

• Your viewer takes a long time to do anything on the page they’re on and their session essential times-out.

Bounce rate can be a very important metric for organizations to react to when trying to improve conversion rates or a large number of other key performance indicators within a web property. 

References: 

Rampton, J. (August, 2015) The 10 Most Important Things You Should Pay Attention to in Analytics. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2015/08/24/the-10-most-important-things-you-should-pay-attention-to-in-analytics/#727e5b3b78ff

Blue Corona ( October, 2016) WHAT IS BOUNCE RATE AND IS IT IMPORTANT. Retrieved from: https://www.bluecorona.com/faq/what-is-bounce-rate-and-is-it-important/

Ariel, R. (December, 2014) What Is Bounce Rate, Is It Important, and How Do You Lower It. Retrieved from: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/what-is-bounce-rate-is-it-important-and-how-do-you-lower-it