Demystifying Bounce Rates
When we’re working with our Denver SEO clients and we walk them through their first analytics report, we often get asked what a bounce rate is. It has nothing to do with fun bounce houses, basketball games, or any other games from childhood. It also is not related to “bounced email” rates.
What Is Bounce Rate?
When you are looking at a search engine optimization (SEO) report and you see your metric for bounce rate, you are viewing the percentage of people who visit one page on your website and then leave.
A visitor to your website can “bounce” by…
- Clicking on a hyperlink to a page on a different website.
- Clicking the “back” button in their browser window to leave your site.
- Closing an open browser window or tab when they had your site open.
- Typing a new URL into their browser.
- A session timeout.
Google calculates your bounce rate as your total number of visits viewing one page only divided by your total number of visits to the page.
What Is Considered A “Good” Bounce Rate?
Opinions on this vary and are somewhat subjective. Some industries consider much higher bounce rates as “healthy bounce rates.”
General Google Analytics benchmark averages for bounce rates, per type of website, are:
- 40-60% for content websites
- 30-50% for lead generation sites
- 70-98% for blog posts
- 20-40% retail sites
- 10-30% for service sites
- 70-90% for landing pages and single-page websites
When Is A High Bounce Rate Okay?
If your website’s visitor has a great experience where they’ve received the information they came to your site looking for and it led to a conversion, turning them into a customer, then a higher bounce rate is perfectly acceptable. These types of interactions often happen on contact pages, checkout pages, customer support pages, and blog articles or tutorials.
From the benchmark averages above, blog posts and landing pages (or single-page website where all of the content is on one page and readers can scroll through it all) are susceptible to high bounce rates. This is okay because people generally click into that page just to read on that one topic and leave satisfied with the information they’ve attained.
How Important Is Bounce Rate?
In addition to looking at your bounce rate, other metrics to look at include:
- Users
- Number of sessions and duration
- Pageviews
- Total time spent on page
Bounce rates, like the other metrics we present in our clients’ Denver SEO reports, need to be looked at closely, but also as one part of the whole picture.