Bounce rate what is it and how do you deal with it

Bounce rate is a metric or statistic from various Analytics tools like Google Analytics that give you an insight how visitors are interacting with your website. But what is it exactly and how can you improve it? And should you want to improve it? We will discuss this in more detail in this blog post.

When launching a website, whether it's a blog or a company website, there are a lot of things to take into account. For example, a goal might be to get the first thousand visitors to your website. Or to keep those thousand visitors on your page as long as possible. Different websites have different bounce rates. And no website is equal in this.

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors on your website that land on the page, any page, on your website. And who then leave the page again. So visitors enter your website, look around for a while or not at all and then leave immediately. They visit only 1 page on your website. After this they continue to another website, or leave the session altogether.

Visitors who then continue to another page on your website or imagine that a visitor lands on a landing page and then continues to the shopping cart or a specific product. That step the visitor takes between the landing page and the other page is not a bounce.

In Google Analytics you can see this directly in your home screen:

What is a normal bounce rate for different types of websites?

A normal bounce rate cannot be named in most scenarios. See for example the following direct quote from Google Analytics:

What you can assume is that a bounce rate of 100% in a lot of websites is not desirable. In a webshop you want visitors to spend some time clicking through to your various pages. People come in on a certain product or advertisement, they read the description, look at the pictures and then go to the shopping cart or continue shopping. A bounce at a web shop can happen at any time in this process, as soon as they enter and don't find what they are looking for, as soon as they don't proceed to the shopping cart, or don't continue browsing the pages.

If you have a blog where your goal is to get people to continue reading your blog then a high bounce rate is not desirable either. You want people and visitors to read your content, not only what they came in on, but also your further content. But you can also have a blog where the goal is to bring people in via an article, and then push them directly to an affiliate. For example Coolblue or one of the big boys from America. A high bounce rate is exactly the goal, people come and you want them to go directly to the affiliate link.

It is entirely dependent on the type of website you have, the type of page where your visitors arrive and what you have for yourself as a goal of your website.

To give you a base line, we have the following figures, which we have collected from various online sources and also some of our own experience of managing thousands of websites. Of course, this is not an exact science, so keep this in mind.

Blog websites: 80 to 95%Webshops
: 70 to 80%Content
/ business websites: 60 to 70%

How can you improve bounce rate?

Bounce rate can be improved by improving some technical things, and shaking up your content or content of your website in various ways. Technical stuff mainly has to do with making your website suitable for mobile and all other devices. Optimizing speed by using caching, reducing and compressing images and using the fastest SSD hosting at MijnHostingPartner.nl.

The content of your website can be a contributing factor to the bounce rate. For example, does your content not match what the visitor expects? If he or she is looking for an article on maintaining ice skates and there is only one sentence dedicated to that. Then you can imagine that visitor leaving quickly.

It could also be that the content of your website is simply too short or too long, or not broken down into readable pieces. Contains too many spelling errors or on the other hand is not attractive enough.

Using images, tables, bullet points can all contribute to inviting people to stay longer on the page and move on to other pages.

Improving bounce rate is an ongoing process and will always need to be taken into account on every page you create.

Another important metric, time on page

What I personally think is an important metric, or even more important on most websites is the time visitors spend on your page, any page. In almost all cases, a visitor who only stays on your page for one to two seconds is not a valuable visitor that you can use.

You want to sell a product on your web shop, get an email from the visitor for further contact, that a blog article is read or that an advertisement is clicked. A visitor who immediately leaves is of little use to you.

That's why the time a visitor spends on your page is in my opinion an important metric to take into account. A valuable new tool that has been added to the field of Analytics tracking is Microsoft Clarity. In a very visual way you can see how your visitors interact with your website. You can play entire sessions of a user where you literally see the mouse and scrolling of a visitor.

What are your bounce rates on your websites? Let us know via social media or any other way we can be reached. We'd love to hear from you!