Q: Chris, what is a Bounce Rate and what does it mean? Should I care?A: Yes, you should care. Bounce rate is a very important number and a pretty good indicator of what people think of your website. Are they staying once they get there, or are they leaving (i.e. bounce).
Bounce Rate is a term and measurement used in Google Analytics. It is a measurement of single-page visits to your website, which in most cases is not the ideal scenario.
Bounce Rate is measured as a percentage and indicates visitors who left your website immediately after arriving.
In other words, they left your website immediately from the entrance page they came in on.
Keep in mind, people don’t always come into your site via your home page, most probably do, but this isn’t always the case.
Bounce rate is a measurement of visit quality and a lower bounce rate is always better than a higher bounce rate.
A higher bounce rate generally indicates something isn’t working correctly at your website or your pages aren’t relevant to the visitor.
Lower Bounce Rate = GOOD
Higher Bounce Rate = NOT GOOD – SIGN OF TROUBLE
When I see a high bounce rate, a bounce rate above 60%, I immediately suspect something is wrong. It could be many things and requires an expert analysis.
Usually, when I’m looking at a bounce rate issues I look at:
Website design
Page copy
Search engine rankings
Traffic sources
Inbound links
And yes, you should be concerned about your bounce rate. For a lot of reasons, but one is that Google takes bounce rate into consideration when it determines how to rank your site. In other word, I site with a high bounce rate might have trouble getting top ranked at Google.
What creates a “bounce?”
A visitor is considered a bounce if…
- They click their “Back” button and leave your site
- They click on a link to a page that brings them to a different website
- They close the browser window they have with your site/page
- They type in a new URL in their browser address bar
- They lose their Internet connection while on your page or experience a session timeout
“Chris’s expertise and guidance has been invaluable to our business. We have a great looking website, it works very well, it’s top ranked at Google, it generates inquiries, and we’re closing sales." Carol Clarke,