What is Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate for the homepage, or any other page through which visitors enter your site, tells you how many people 'bounce' away (leave) from your site after viewing one page.

So, if the bounce rate from your homepage is 30% (which is relatively low), that means that 30% of your visitors ‘bounce away’ from your homepage.

The concept is designed to tell you how your homepage performs. Keep in mind that different types of resources, for example, products, services, or information, will have different bounce rates and usage patterns.

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate 

Set Realistic Expectations: Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates

• Content Websites: 40-60%
• Lead Generation: 30-50%
• Blogs: 70-98%
• Retail Sites:  20-40%
• Service Sites: 10-30%
• Landing Pages: 70-90%

Attract the Right Visitors

• Choose the right keywords to match your content -- not just to attract the most number of visitors.
• Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
• Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
• Write attractive, useful Meta descriptions for search engine users.
• Improve targeting of online advertising campaigns.

Enhance Usability

• Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bulleted lists, white space, good color contrast, and large headlines.
• Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers .

Speed Up Page Load Time

• Use little or no self-loading multimedia content.
• Set external links to open in new browser windows/tabs.
• Don’t let ads distract from your content: Place static ads to sides, and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.

Provide Quality Content

• Have an obvious main message.
• Use clear headers and subheads.
• Tailor content to intended visitors.
• Use stylish copy and images.
• Make your content error-free.
• Include a clear call-to-action and obvious links to next steps.

What is a good/average bounce rate?

It depends.  The average website bounce rate is 40% (source: Google).  But this is completely meaningless, because what constitutes a good bounce rate varies by:

• industry
• brand credibility
• type of site
• type of page
• step in the funnel (where the page is in the site)
• stage of the customer lifecycle
• user intent
• and many other potential factors.

But I digress and would like to give you some high level bounce rate examples for your reference.

Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate

• 40-60% Content websites
• 30-50% Lead generation sites
• 70-98% Blogs
• 20-40% Retail sites
• 10-30% Service sites
• 70-90% Landing pages

Final Tip on Bounce rate – Segment!

Keep in mind that user expectations and intent varies based on many factors.  To avoid bounce rate from deceiving you, we highly recommend segmenting your data.  In aggregate, the bounce rate can look good or bad, but be just the opposite or be hiding substantial problems.

Here are a few segmentation examples to consider that can help you better evaluate your site and marketing performance.

• Location - If your company is a local business serving San Francisco, you should expect a high bounce rate from outside of California.  If you are a local business, definitely segment your traffic to understand how traffic is performing within your local area and avoid it being skewed by irrelevant visits.
• Device – A desktop user, tablet user and a mobile user often have different intent.  For example, we expect more people to bounce on a mobile device than a desktop/tablet user, because mobile users are often looking for specific info like an answer to a question versus casually browsing or shopping.  Keep in mind that bounce rates are higher on sites that don’t provide a mobile optimized site experience such as responsive design.
• New vs Returning – A returning visitor has different intent than does a new visitor.  It is common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with your brand.  You should segment your traffic to optimize individually for new visitors and returning visitors.
• Medium – People coming to your site from the many possible mediums such as website referral, email, social, direct, organic, paid, display, offline, pr, and etc have different expectations set and will often have substantially different bounce rates.  Segment by medium and you will likely be shocked to see how the bounce rates vary.