06 Sep What You Need to Know About Bounce Rate

If you have a website for your business, you’ve undoubtedly heard about bounce rate as an important metric in measuring the effectiveness of a website in terms of user engagement. Basically, it’s the percentage of visitors to your website who land on a page and leave that page without taking any further action. As our blog post – “High Bounce Rates – Causes and Cures” – notes, while driving visitors to your company’s website is the first step in getting more business, the second step is getting those visitors to stay so they can begin the great conversion process to becoming customers.

Although it would seem that visitors who abruptly leave your site after viewing only one page didn’t like what they saw or didn’t find what they were looking for, experts say that such a conclusion is somewhat simplistic. That’s why a deeper dive into what bounce rate actually means can help you better understand and interpret this metric – and make the necessary improvements to your website.

Is There Such a Thing as a “Good” Bounce Rate?

According to Fullstory, “It depends on your industry, where your traffic comes from, and what type of page it lands on. According to HubSpot, the average bounce rate for most websites is anywhere from 26% to 70%. Moreover, the average bounce rate for a B2B website is 56%, while the average bounce rate for a B2C website is 45%. 

“As a general guideline, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good, while a bounce rate of 55% or higher is considered high and may indicate that improvements are needed to engage visitors and encourage them to explore more of your website.

“Exit rate is the percentage of people who leave a particular page after visiting any number of pages on a website. The bounce rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave that same page without taking any further action.”

Why It Isn’t Always Bad When a Visitor Leaves After Visiting Only One Page

In her article for Search Engine Journal, Amelia Wilson – owner of AWCopywriting – makes the following observation:

“Sometimes, your content is efficient enough that people can quickly get what they need and bounce! This can be a wonderful thing. Perhaps you’ve achieved the content marketer’s dream and created awesome content that wholly consumed them for a handful of minutes in their lives. Or perhaps you have a landing page that only requires the user to complete a short lead form.

“To determine whether your bounce rate is nothing to worry about, you’ll want to look at the Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration metrics in Google Analytics. You can also conduct user experience testing and A/B testing to see if the high bounce rate is a problem.

“If the user is spending a couple of minutes or more on the page, it sends a positive signal to Google that they found your page highly relevant to their search query. If you want to rank for that particular search query, that kind of user intent is gold.”

Also, writes SEO and inbound marketing expert Jason Little for Crazy Egg’s blog, The Daily Egg, “If someone lands on your site and is looking for an address or business hours, it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to land and bounce. A visit to your business would still be considered to be a conversion.”

Common Causes of the “Bad” Types of Bounces

Of course, there are still the “bad” types of bounces to account for – the types in which visitors just up and leave the page they landed on without engaging with your website any further. There are many reasons your website may be experiencing the bad kind of bounce rate – from a single factor to a combination. The most common include the following.

Slow-to-load pages – Experts cite this as the top reason for high bounce rates. Site speed is part of Google’s ranking algorithm – which means your website will suffer even more with lower page rankings. As covered in our blog post – “Why Your Website Needs to be Up-to-Speed” – the average visitor will only tolerate a load time of up to two seconds. Google’s engineers have found that potential customers will visit a site less often if it’s slower than that of a close competitor’s by more than 250 milliseconds. Among their other discoveries: even 400 milliseconds – literally the blink of an eye – is too long for website visitors to wait for a page to load.

To test the speed of your website and diagnose errors that are slowing it down, try GT Metrix, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. We use them here at Virtual Stacks Systems, and they are trusted in our industry as go-to sources for accurate page speed testing.

Poor user experience – According to Fullstory, “A website’s user experience (UX) is a huge factor when it comes to whether someone will stay on the page or not. If your website is filled with intrusive ads, annoying pop-ups, or auto-playing videos, chances are users won’t stick around to find out what else you have to offer.”

Add such offenders as confusing page layout, bad design, hard-to-read typeface and poorly organized menus to this list.

Website not optimized for mobile – With the majority of people now accessing the internet on their mobile phone, a website that isn’t mobile-responsive won’t retain visitors. After all, nobody wants to look at a web page rendered in miniature that’s also impossible to navigate! Moreover, Google uses mobile data to determine search rankings, so mobile usability is more important than ever before.

However, as Aillum points out, even responsive websites can still have issues. Some of these include:

• Elements overlapping or being squeezed on mobile screens, resulting in a broken, unusable website.
• Important and relevant content being pushed down the page, below the fold, requiring visitors to scroll further.
• Pages loading more slowly due to large resources being used, of which some mobile devices may struggle with.

404 pages and other technical errors – Pages that return a 404 Page Not Found error or otherwise don’t load properly also produce high bounce rates. There are many possible causes, both internal and external, but as Wilson points out – it’s critical to fix them as soon as possible. Her directions for diagnosing the problem are as follows:

“Take a look at the page from your audience’s most popular browser and device configurations (e.g. Safari on desktop and mobile, Chrome on mobile, etc.) to replicate their experience. You can also check in Search Console under Crawl > Crawl Errors to discover the issue from Google’s perspective. Correct the issue yourself or talk to someone who can—an issue like this can cause Google to drop your page from the search results in a hurry.”

Bad content – There’s no getting away from the fact that content that’s poorly written and/or doesn’t give visitors the relevant information they’re looking for will sink your website’s effectiveness in driving business!

Fullstory sums it up best: “Low-quality content is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to high bounce rates. If your content is filled with spelling and grammar errors, overly long paragraphs, or irrelevant topics, readers won’t be inclined to stick around for long.”

The Take-Home Message and Our Blatant Self-Promotion

If you recognize any of the above causes of the “bad” type of bounce rate, correcting them will go a long way in letting visitors to your website know they’re in the right place for the information, product or service they’re looking for! Which brings us to the reason you should call us! You’re focusing on your business – you shouldn’t add having to become a digital marketing expert to your duties. That’s our business!

Virtual Stacks Systems is a full-service digital marketing agency offering experienced website design and redesign, SEO marketing, content writing, social media marketing, PPC advertising  and so much more! We welcome the opportunity to help you meet your marketing objectives and succeed. Every small business is unique, and so are our solutions!

Contact us today to get started!