Bounce rate is calculated as the number of single-page sessions on your site divided by all sessions.
If you’ve dipped your toes into Google Analytics, you may have noticed, among the statistics presented on the audience overview tab, the “bounce rate” for your site. This figure, represented as a percentage, is a vital statistic.
Tracking your site bounce rate is an important practice. In fact, Search Engine Journal ranks it as the third most important user experience key performance indicator (KPI), just under “time on page” and “page views.”
But what precisely is a bounce rate? This guide will give you all the insight you need to understand why bounce rate is important, how to measure and track it, and steps you can take in your SEO strategy to improve it.
A bounce occurs when a user visits a single page on your site, then exits that page without visiting any other pages. As defined by Google, it is a single-page session on your site. In Google Analytics, a bounce is recognized when a user opens a single page, then exits without triggering any further requests to the Analytics server. Since there were no subsequent requests to allow Google to measure the length of the session, the session duration for this visit is registered as 0 seconds.
Your “bounce rate” is calculated as the number of bounces on your site divided by all sessions. This statistic lets you know how many sessions on your site involve engagement with only one page.
Note that the concepts outlined above are also commonly applied to email marketing campaigns; an email that is opened and does not lead to further action from the recipient may be considered a “bounce.” As with web development and SEO, a high bounce rate in an email marketing campaign may signal that optimization is in order.
While your bounce and exit rates are key statistics to track in regards to site engagement, it’s important not to conflate these two terms. As explained above, your bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions on your site. Conversely, the exit rate measures the number of people who exit your website after landing on a specific page, divided by the total number of page views that page received.
This percentage lets site owners know how many sessions on a site — including visits from other pages on your site — ended when visitors exited that specified page.
A page with a high exit rate can be identified as problematic if, by design, it should not. A checkout page on an e-commerce site is expected to have a high exit rate. A piece of bottom-funnel marketing content should not. If the latter is losing visitors with a high exit rate, that page may need to be optimized.
There has been a long debate over whether bounce rates affect SEO. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes confirmed that bounce rate is not a ranking factor for Google.
However, it’s a bad idea to disregard this metric based solely on those facts. This is because bounce rate indirectly affects several SEO factors such as dwell time, time on site, and conversion rates. These have an impact on your site’s rankings in the SERPs.
The strongest ranking factors continue to be strong links and quality content. Your bounce rate does not necessarily impact your rankings. It may, however, indicate areas in need of optimization.
Read our comprehensive SEO keyword research guide to learn how you can get your web pages to show up higher in the SERPs.
Check out our ultimate link building guide to learn how to earn powerful backlinks to empower your web content in search.
You don’t need to optimize your website specifically with your bounce rate in mind, but it can be a good indication of the quality of the user experience. Generally, a 40% to 55% bounce rate is average, while anything over 70% warrants investigation for most types of sites. Note, however, that there is no one “ideal” bounce rate that all web developers and marketers should aspire to. This is because bounce rates vary from industry to industry.
Your bounce rate may differ based on your website’s purpose and industry, your traffic acquisition methods, and the preferred device (mobile vs. desktop) of your target audience. As noted above, e-commerce sites generally have higher bounce rates than average, while news sites are generally lower. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to compare bounce rates within your industry.
Further, because different traffic acquisition methods are associated with vastly different bounce rates, it’s possible that relying too much on high-bounce channels could inflate your site’s overall bounce rate. This wouldn’t necessarily call for optimization, nor for a change of course.
Finally, note that user behavior trends differ depending on the device they use to access web content. As most web developers who work on mobile-first sites can attest, mobile users are more likely to bounce from a page after retrieving the information they need. As such, mobile pages are more likely to have higher bounce rates.
If your site is built on mobile-first design principles, you may have separate pages for mobile and desktop users. An easy method to compare bounce rates for mobile and desktop users is to refer to your site data on Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. In the fifth column over, you should see the bounce rate for each page. By simply comparing the bounce rates for mobile and desktop pages, you may glean more about user behavior and where you should optimize.
There are countless reasons that your bounce rate might be higher than you’d like. As such, there are many potential solutions. Review the following tips with your site in mind. If your site has room for improvement in the following ways, you can likely improve your bounce rate by addressing them:
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