What is an acceptable “Bounce Rate” for a website?
One of my client’s has a website that is REALLY struggling.
When I look at the site analytics it seems like the bounce rates are through the roof…
Debbie
It greatly depends on the site and what you are asking people to do when they get there and of course how they got there…
If page one is a payment form to see the entire site with no links, 90%+ will be the norm.
If it’s a content site about feeding cats with no sign up or payment requirements, ample links, and all the traffic is coming from searches “how do i feed cats” you may be under 20%.
Many things drive up bounce rates from barriers to using the site to mismatched traffic to design issues to just not having a lot of options on the page or even using AJAX without logging on-page clicks.
Also, the source of traffic will greatly affect bounce rate. In general, SE traffic will bounce less, whereas (and my own experience backs this up) social bookmark traffic will see your BR rocket.
…that’s just mismatched traffic though as you said.
Especially traffic from stumbleupon is horrible for your bounce rate, average time spent on site is also something like 10 sec. One of the things that help reducing the bounce rate at my site, was to show links to related articles. My homepage now has a bounce rate of 50%, articles range from 50-90 or so, but used to be lower. Ever since I started to get traffic from stumbleupon, the bounce rate increased a lot.
Depends. A calendar or “hours” page will probably be >90%. On the other hand your “flagship” content should ideally be <50%.
Homepages are a touchy one. Most homepages are nothing more than a directory to get users to your content. The more I see of this trend the higher I’ve seen associated bounce-rates.
In other words, don’t worry about it. I would concentrate heavier on conversions and other metrics as a measure of effectiveness.
I’ve heard things like 40%-60% being an acceptable bounce rate range for B2B sites, but it’s all subjective. A website’s overall bounce rate might be low, but maybe people are getting lost on the site because it’s disorganized or the navigation isn’t clear. So they’re looking visiting more than one page on the site, but maybe not for a good reason. I agree with what Chris said, conversions are a much more useful metric.
Focus on conversions not bounce rate, I have a 75% bounce but I convert really well though so I’m still in the money!
As any other analytics parameter, bounce rate shouldn’t be absolutised. Sites that contain too many ramifications until visitors arrive to the conversion page are surely to chase visitors away. Bounce rates also depend on the campaigns that are held, on the configuration of the landing pages.
My main site has a bounce rate of 60% and I was a bit worried about it but had no real idea of what it should be, and had heard mentions of 20-30% on other forums, so the comments here have very much put it into perspective for me.
If the visitor finds the information they are looking for on the first page they land on, the bounce rate is probably going to be pretty high. It seems that a lot of website visitors, at least mine, are not surfers looking to kill time. They want to find some information and when they find it they are gone.
So a high bounce rate is not necessarily an indicator of poor content. It could be an indicator of high quality content giving the visitor what they are looking for. If you want to try to encourage some visitors to stay, put links to other related pages or things of interest on your pages to give some visitors with time to kill something to look at.
My bounce rate on my main site is about 39% for the home page. On my home page I have links to other content on my site. My main index page is pretty much information as to what the site is about, navigation links, recent updates, etc.
Having looked at my Google Analytics in more detail, I agree with cheesedude. I have one internal page with a particularly high bounce rate of 87% and it is dedicated to the local weather. It features high in SERP and I think many visitors just look at the information they want and then move on. However, 13% of them go to other pages and that is the positive side of it.
You could have locked this thread after that sentence.
Unless you’d like to link the site Debbie and we can see if there are specific issues with it?
so asside from the actual content, what else can you do to improve bounce rates. Maybe include links to “similar content”? Or other links to other parts of the site, maybe a news feed?