In digital marketing, the act of “bouncing” is someone who visits a website and then immediately leaves, without interacting with the site. When the visitor leaves without interacting with the website means that the user comes in, looks around, stays a few seconds, and then leaves.
What is a bounce rate?
A bounce rate is a metric that shows the percentage of visitors that land on a page of a website and then leave without taking action. This action could be clicking on a link, making a purchase or even visiting a second page of the website. The metric only counts visits to one page and that is the landing page (the page that led the users to the website).
How is calculated?
The bounce rate is calculated by dividing bounced visitors by the total number of users that arrived on the website. But in order to track the website visits, every page’s code on the website should have a Google Analytics tracking ID.
When someone visits the website this code triggers a session. If the visitor leaves the site without taking action the session expires and their visit counts as a “bounce”. But if the user interacts within the website and takes an action that triggers an event. Then the code fires and Google Analytics considers it as not a bounce.
This metric measures how effective is one website relative to the viewers. The bounce rate can be high or low. If the purpose of the website is for users to take a detailed look at it, then a high bounce rate indicates a problem.
What is a high bounce rate?
A high bounce rate might indicate that the page didn’t meet the user’s expectations or the content is not relevant to the viewers.
Some other issues for high levels of this metric could be the navigation, site speed, or a site error. It is important for businesses to pay attention to the bounce rate. Over time a high bounce rate negatively impacts search ranking because it indicates poor user experience of the website. To reduce the high levels we could improve the content of the site, copywriting, or user experience.
The only exception for a high bounce rate is if the purpose of the website is only to visit one page. If the purpose of the site is to leave a review or send a message then is normal for users to click away after completing an action.
What is a low bounce rate?
A low bounce rate means that users are not leaving after reading only one page. Most of the time lower bounce rate means better user engagement. But if the bounce rate is too low it might be a problem. For example, it could be a technical issue with how the analytics tracking code is integrated into the site.
Often bounce rate is misunderstood as exit rate, but they are different metrics.
What is Exit Rate?
Exit rate is a metric that measures the percentage of visitors that exit from a page after viewing several pages on the website.
Bounce rate and exit rate are important indicators of how satisfied the users are with the website’s content. And both of them are highlighting the problems that are causing users to leave the website. Once you are aware of what the potential problems are, you can start investigating further.
