A ‘Bounce’ is what happens when a user visits your website and leaves almost immediately without visiting any other pages on your site. ‘Bounce Rate’ is the percentage of users who bounce your website out of all the users who visit your site.
Bounce Rate is important because it is one of the best measures of how effective and engaging your website content is. If your website is of poor quality and the information on it is neither interesting nor of little value to your users, then they are highly likely to leave within a very short period of time.
Bounce Rate is also useful for exposing problems with your sites search engine optimisation. If your website content does not accurately reflect the results of a users search criteria that they used to find your site in the first place, then they will leave immediately. After all, if you clicked on a link expecting to find a web page selling apples and you landed on a website selling cars, you are going to be a very confused (not to mention a little hacked off). Remember, there’s no point in just getting traffic for traffic’s sake. You need to make sure you attracting the type of traffic that will convert into enquiries (or sales or interactions).
Unlike many other forms of traffic measurement, it is important to have the lowest possible Bounce Rate. Having a low bounce rate is important because of two primary reasons:
1. It means that our website content is engaging, encourages people to read it and find out more about your services.
2. Your website search optimisation is well targeted and relevant to the search terms that people would expect to find.
Both of these points will hopefully mean that the visitors who come to your site are doing so because they find your site valuable and informative. This should hopefully reflect in the number of enquiries, leads and interactions that your website generates.
What figure you should be looking at depends on the site and its subject matter. As a guideline, the BML Creative website is currently running on a Bounce Rate of about 1-2% which we are pretty happy with (you’ll always get some people who end up on your site by mistake, or don’t necessarily like what they find when they get there). However, we have seen many instances of sites with bounce rates up to 80% and over. Websites with a high bounce rate generally have some pretty fundamental issues that need addressing.
Whether it’s a redesign, new content a copy rewrite or adding new engaging features like video and animation, it’s important to consider your target audience and what will be useful to them. If you can offer something unique from your competitors, or a new way of doing things then you are more likely to reap the rewards that a truly engaging website can bring.
If you want to discuss ways to lower your bounce rate and improve the online experience for your users, then please contact BML today and ask about our web design services.
subscribe
Bloody good post. Since taking control of the PPC campaign where I work I’ve quadrupled the time on site and lowered the bounce rate 20%, but cut the number of visitors 75%. I guess that means I’m wasting less money, but it’s sort of frustrating too!
Hi Pete, thanks for your comment. Well done on the improvements to your PPC campaign. Getting 4x longer linger time is really good work – obviously shows that you are attracting the kind of the visitors who are interested in the services you offer. As for the visitor numbers being reduced by 75% – that is a little concerning, but is probably more of an indication that the previous PPC campaigns were too broad and receiving too many irrelevant visits. I would try generating new content relevant to your business that will try to tap into to some of the longer-tailed keywords relating to your business. This can be very effective in building visitor numbers without sacrificing bounce and linger rates. Hope that might be of use. Thanks, David.
Dude, thank you so much. This is perfect for me. I’m just getting into traffic building and this information will come in really useful. Going into my bookmarks!
If most of your traffic is from Search Engines, then the bounce rate will be high. Building a good community around the blog is the best way to reduce the bounce rate. Blogs with general stuffs have high bounce rate.
I’m currently experiencing high bounce rate, I think I need to optimize my keywords and the design. Maybe its the reason why my site doesn’t have active commenter. Thanks for this information, at least I got a hint now.
I honestly never knew about bounce rates until after reading this site so guess I owe you a thank you for the information :) . It is true that some sites are visited only for some seconds. It is important that the people who visit your site get exactly what they are searching for.
Obtaining information about bounce rates are very critical. A high bounce rate may be disappointing but this provides one an opportunity to see where exactly to make improvements on. There’s no point in getting traffic if your visitors leave almost instantaneously after visiting your site. This is definitely something that needs to be looked at regularly.