Not Everyone Who Bounces Is a Disappointed Visitor

You’ve probably been there: alarmed by a high bounce rate, you started ripping through your website to find what could be repelling visitors.

But while this metric seems to convey a simple message, understanding its true implications requires a deeper look. Not everyone who bounces is a disappointed visitor. In this post, we’ll share some insight on what you can realistically expect from your bounce rate and how you can effectively measure and track for growth.

What Is a Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who left without interacting. Each visitor who leaves your website from the same page they entered, without watching a video, clicking ‘read more’ or clicking-through to another page counts as a ‘bounce’. So this metric indicates how many visitors ‘came, saw, and left’.

In Google Analytics terms, the bounce rate measures the percentage of single interaction visits to your site. The user ‘bounces’ back from the same page they entered without sending any additional trigger to the analytics server.

Keep this in mind because it will help you make sense of the numbers as we dive deeper.

How Is Bounce Rate Calculated?

An analytics software calculates the bounce rate by dividing single-interaction visits by total visits to your site. In other words, it’s a percentage of the total visits during a set period. If you had 500 visitors to your site on day X and 250 left without taking action, your bounce rate on day X is 50%. This includes visitors who remained on the page until the session timed out.

Bounce Rate = Single-Page Visits (Bounces) ÷ Total Visits (Sessions)

To use this metric efficiently, you can measure and track bounce rates for specific pages or page groups. This is critical for understanding how people interact and can be a great help when optimizing your site.

What Is a Good Bounce Rate?

The lower the bounce rate, the better, right? After all, you want people to take maximum interest in your site. True, that’s your goal, but there are several factors to consider before you decide that your site needs fixing.

In general, you should expect your website’s bounce rate to be anywhere between 26%-70%, with an average between 45%-65%. However, if you are in eCommerce, this may not be good enough.

Take a look at the average bounce rates per industry according to SimilarWeb analytics:

Why Do Average Bounce Rates Vary per Industry?

Just think, a visitor to an eCommerce site is like a customer in a store. They will look at various items before buying or leaving. The intention of a visitor to a news site, blog, or dictionary is entirely different. People are looking for a specific piece of information and will leave right after they find just that.

Consider Your Traffic Channels

Now you have a starting point. But industry type is not your only benchmark factor.

SimilarWeb’s analytics reveal that visitors arriving through email and referral are least likely to bounce while traffic from display ads or social media produces the highest bounce rate.

Use these benchmarks for an overall evaluation. For a serious analysis and to reach decisions on how to grow website engagement, you will need more precise numbers and want to compare with your direct competitors.

Another thing is, bounce rate alone doesn’t tell you much about performance. To understand what the numbers indicate, you’ll need to look at additional engagement metrics, such as session duration, in correlation.

Is Mobile Traffic Different From Desktop Traffic?

Before you move on to analyzing additional data, consider one more significant variable: device. Mobile users across the board are more likely to bounce than desktop users.

At SimilarWeb we checked the data for May 2020 about traffic to the top 100 websites worldwide and found a variance of more than 16% in the mobile and desktop bounce rates.

Why Is My Bounce Rate High?

The Page Does Not Meet the Visitor’s Expectation

This is the first reason that jumps to mind. The user was looking for one thing and found something else. User intent and page content do not match.

Why does this happen?

• The page could be optimized for the wrong keywords
• Ad content may have raised expectations that the page doesn’t meet
• The answer to the visitor’s query is not immediately visible

Visitors Find What They Are Searching

A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad sign. If a person with a specific intent found the exact answer to their query, they have no reason for further action. Take the weather forecast on a news portal as an example, where people sign in to quickly check the local temperature.

On most sites, you would still strive to lower your bounce rate. Why? Because getting visitors to browse additional pages indicates that your website provides additional value and has a positive impact on your SEO.

Low-Quality Page or Content

Never underestimate the damaging impact of poor page quality. An unattractive design can cause people to turn back. Too many irrelevant items can distract the focus. Small text or a font that isn’t easily readable presents an obstacle. Nobody wants to work hard to get what they came to find.

A few questions to ask yourself:

• Is my UX intuitive, or could visitors find it awkward?
• Does the page load fast enough?
• Is the call-to-action button (CTA) obvious and compelling enough?
• Is the page mobile-friendly?
• Is my content accurate, well written, and engaging?

Make sure the page does not produce an error, and your analytics are set up correctly. You may be excited about a particularly low bounce rate, but if you are outside the normal range, it should raise a red flag.

Also remember, the bounce rate counts single-interaction visits. A pop-up on the page, an auto-play video, or any other event occurring on the page will send an additional trigger to analytics. In this case, the visit does not count as a bounce, even though there was no interaction.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate?

Here are some popular tips and tools that you can use to reduce your bounce rate:

• Format your content and make sure it’s highly readable, has good style, and correct grammar. You can test how readable your site is with WebFX’s Readability Test Tool
• Make your CTA buttons clear and easy-to-understand. Customers who don’t understand your product are usually the most likely to bounce
• Improve your website’s page load time to increase your traffic and customer satisfaction. Google’s Speed Test is a good tool for checking this
• A/B test your copy and creatives to see what’s working the best. You can use user behavior recording tools such as Hotjar to monitor your visitors’ reactions
• Consider incorporating Live Chat Support like Intercom into your website to connect with visitors before they leave your website

Track and Monitor Your Competitors’ Bounce Rates

We’ve talked a lot about benchmarking to understand what your data tells you. With SimilarWeb’s marketing intelligence platform, you can make better business decisions based on a bounce rate benchmark by handpicking your competitors for comparison.

Benchmark Your Bounce Rate Against the Competition

Using SimilarWeb, choose up to four of your toughest competing sites and compare their bounce rates to yours.

Competitive Analysis: Comparing an eCommerce website to four competitors

Simply looking at the sites with high traffic and low bounce rates can give you an idea of what they have in common that works well. If your site performs best, pat yourself on the back, but keep tracking.

Let’s take it a step further. Connect the bounce rate data with marketing channel data. First, check for your own site. If, for example, the traffic from display ads is exceptionally high, but so is the bounce rate, that’s not effective.

Then compare with the competitors you picked and see how their pages perform.

Competitive Analysis: Comparing bounce rates according to marketing channels

If you discover that your paid search is under-performing (i.e., Target in the example above), you need to investigate why. Check the pages of the top-performing competitors. Don’t copy, just try to understand what works. Make one change to your page and measure again. Keep adjusting, testing, and tracking. Watch your bounce rate go down, and your site engagement grow.

Additionally, reports can easily be exported from SimilarWeb’s platform, which you can then share with your team members — allowing you to showcase successes or highlight areas that need improvement.

Bounce Rate: Exporting a report as either an image or an Excel spreadsheet

Put Your Learning Into Practice

The path suggested in this blog post is only one of the many paths you can take towards utilizing your bounce rate data for optimization and digital growth. Ready to take the next step? Open an account to get hands-on experience or contact us for more details.