What is bounce rate?

The bounce rate or bounce rate is a website traffic metric. It indicates the number of users who have visited and abandoned the site without taking any action, such as leaving a comment, sharing the page, subscribing, making a purchase, etc. If no action is taken, the number of pages viewed during the session is only one: the one the user has just left. This type of session with no actions is called a single-page session.

In this article, in addition to having defined what the bounce rate is, we will see why bounces occur, how to measure the bounce rate in Google Analytics and what bounce rate is acceptable for our website.

why does a bounce occur?

A bounce occurs when the user performs a single page session. This can occur because the user:

• Closed the browser
• Clicked the “Back” button of the browser
• Did nothing on the page until the session expired
• Typed a new URL in the search bar
• ..

Therefore, the bounce rate does not depend so much on our site, but on circumstantial factors on the user’s side, which does not mean that it is impossible to improve our bounce rate.

why is the bounce rate an important metric?

The Google search engine is not human, so it must appeal to page rank algorithms to determine the quality and relevance of a web page. And one of the metrics it employs is bounce rate.

Google assumes that if users stay on the page for a long time and/or perform actions on it, then it must be good. And, therefore, worthy of appearing in an acceptable position among the search results.

This is why the bounce rate is a metric that we must know in detail if we want to increase our conversions.

how to measure the bounce rate in Google analytics?

Now, how to measure the bounce rate in Google Analytics? The first thing to know is that Analytics calculates it by dividing the number of sessions of a single page by the total number of sessions of the website.

For example, if during a month our website received 3,000 visits and, of these, 600 were of the “enter and leave” type, the bounce rate is equal to 0.2. That is, 20%.

To see our bounce rate in Google Analytics from different angles, we just need to access the reports provided by this online tool:

• Overview, to see the total bounce rate of our site
• Channels, which filters this metric by channel grouping
• All traffic, which shows the bounce rate for each source/media tuple
• All pages, to get the bounce rate per individual page

This way we can see which specific pages or channels we need to improve to decrease our bounce rate.

what bounce rate is acceptable?

Once we know how to measure bounce rate, we want to know if it is within the acceptable range. But there is no fixed measurement to determine what bounce rate is acceptable. It all depends on what type of website we have.

In a blog, for example, it is normal for the bounce rate in Google Analytics to be high (35% – 55%), since this type of website does not usually have more than one page or demand a lot of user activity.

Something similar happens with landing pages, whose design is usually simple (with some exceptions), and therefore the bounce rate is usually in the range of 25% – 45%.

On the other hand, it is normal for an informative site to contain many pages and request actions such as subscriptions to a newsletter, viewing the latest news or downloading files, among others. Acceptable figures in these cases are between 15% and 30%.

This is also valid for online stores, which may have dozens of pages and constantly invite actions such as purchases, subscriptions, form filling, product evaluations, etc. An online store usually has a bounce rate in Google Analytics of between 20% and 40%.

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