Use Google Bounce Rate to Analyze Website Effectiveness

100 Best Practices

If you use Google Analytics (and you should be) it will give you what is known as a “Bounce Rate.”

It is an important number to know and it will tell you if people are coming to your website and staying or IMMEDIATELY leaving.

People staying is better than immediately leaving, right?

Google Analytics considers a “bounce” as a one page visit.

In other words, someone visiting your website took one look and for some reason hit their back button.

This is particularly an issue if they came to your website from a search at Google because Google watches that. High bounce rates tell Google that someone visiting your website didn’t like what they saw and returned to the search engine results page (SERP) they came from.

If your home page is the primary gateway to the rest of your site, and for many websites it is, and a high percentage of users are viewing only your home page, then you would NOT WANT a high bounce rate. If this is the case, a high Bounce Rate is likely to indicate something is not working properly at your website.

That said, many things impact Bounce Rate, including:

  • Hosting performance
  • Website design
  • Visitor-experience
  • Quality of visitor traffic
  • Home page message
  • Other site content
  • Main entry pages into your website (they are not always your home page!)
  • A non-mobile-friendly website
  • Following an outbound link (NEVER put outbound links on your homepage, NEVER!)

Checking your Bounce Rate with Google Analytics is easy.

(1) Login to Google Analytics

(2) Look for it in the default Dashboard (usually the first screen you see)

or from the Dashboard (left side options)

(3) Select AUDIENCE | OVERVIEW

Alternatively, you can drill down into just about visitor data and see the Bounce Rate on those data-points.

For example, new visitor or returning visitor Bounce Rate. Desktop visitor or mobile visitor Bounce Rate.

Drill down on almost any data-point in Google Analytics and you’ll see what the Bounce Rate for that data-point is.

What’s a good Bounce Rate?

Generally speaking, if a bounce rate is under 40% you are in good shape.

Below 25% very good.

70% or higher is most likely a problem.

Anything above 50%, or 1/2 of your traffic “bouncing,” is worth taking a look at and trying to figure out what’s going on.

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