What is a bounce rate?

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website without interacting with the content.

In general, it's important to have the lowest possible bounce rate, of course, as it can rarely be considered a success if users leave again. However, a high bounce rate may be more natural for some sites - we'll come back to why in a later section.

This article will also give you tips on where to find information about your bounce rates and what you can do to improve them.

Why is the bounce rate important?

Every page has a bounce rate, and this percentage is an effective indicator of how good you are at capturing visitors' interest with your content and encouraging them to click through to other content.

The bounce rate is a simple calculation. For example, if your website has 200 visitors, and 80 of them only see the entrance page, the page they land on and then click away, you have a bounce rate of 40%.

A low bounce rate means that the site is 'effective' and manages to get visitors to click through and hopefully make the desired conversion.

The bounce rate is not only a good indicator for you to optimise your content to improve the user experience, but it also has an impact on your Google ranking.

What is a conversion?

For many in the digital world, a conversion equals a purchase made in a webshop, but we think it makes sense to consider the concept of conversion more broadly. We define a conversion as an action a visitor takes - an action that is critical to your business. From this perspective, conversion can therefore also happen when signing up for a newsletter or other sign-ups.

If you sell services, consultancy or similar, you may want to look at your customer journey and more specifically how your website supports sales. There are probably some critical touch-points in the journey where it is crucial that visitors act in a certain way.

This is where it makes sense to take an analytical approach to conversion optimisation and look at data - including bounce rates - that tells the story of how well your website supports your sales goals.

A high bounce rate doesn't have to be negative

As mentioned, a high bounce rate is not always negative. It can also mean that users find exactly what they are looking for and therefore don't need to click further. For example, if you have a blog with many regular readers, the bounce rate will often be high as the regular readers only come to read the latest blog post.

If you have a webshop, on the other hand, the bounce rate should not be too high, as you naturally want users to find their way all the way to the checkout. As mentioned, some sites will naturally have a high bounce rate, and here it's also important to look at how long a visitor has spent on the site. If they visit the page, read the entire article or blog post to the end without taking any further action, a high bounce rate in this case is not necessarily bad. However, there is still room for optimisation by, for example, working with social sharing and inviting dialogue in the comments section or other interaction with your content. Read how to improve your bounce rate later in the article.

What is a good bounce rate?

A good bounce rate depends a lot on the type of website in question. According to Search Engine Journal, the average bounce rate is between 41-55%.

Bounce rate

• 20% or less = may indicate an error in your tracking data!

• 21-40% = very good!

• 41-55% = average

• 56-70%: higher than normal

• Over 70% = very bad!

Bounce rate in Google Analytics

You can find the bounce rate in the Google Analytics analytics tool. There are several places where the bounce rate appears, but in general you can see the average bounce rate for all pages on the homepage.

Bounce rate per channel/traffic

It can be interesting to take a deeper dive and see if there are specific channels where the bounce rate deviates from the average. In the side menu under: Acquisition > All traffic > Channels, you will find an overview of the different channels that drive traffic to your website.

For example, if the bounce rate is high on traffic coming from an organic search, you can work with the different tags that improve your snippet - i.e. your display on Google's search results page. The purpose of this exercise is to make your snippet as accurate as possible in relation to the content you link to.

If the expectations that searchers get from your snippet and the content they encounter match, they are more likely to interact with other relevant content on your page, thereby reducing your bounce rate.

Bounce rate at content level

The bounce rate for the individual articles and pages can be found in the side menu: Behaviour > Site content > All pages

Here you get an overview of all pages and the option to sort them by the bounce rate. Of course, you can only see the bounce rate for pages that have actually been visited.

As described in the section on conversion, when assessing whether the bounce rate on a single page is good or less good, it should always be in relation to the specific goal you have for the page.

Whether your bounce rate is high or low, there is usually room for improvement. Remember, it's an ongoing process to optimise your content and give your visitors the best user experience - at least better than your closest competitors.

But it IS worth the effort, because you give your website the best conditions for a good Google ranking.

Here are some concrete tips on how to improve your bounce rate.

How to improve bounce rate?

When you want to improve your bounce rate, start by taking a closer look at the pages and channels that have a high bounce rate. Some of your pages have a naturally high bounce rate, such as the cookie and privacy policy page, so you shouldn't put too much effort into it.

There are also certain channels, such as social media, that can tend to have a higher bounce rate. This has to do with the context the user is in when they click on a link to your content.
We use social media extensively in the small breaks in our daily lives. Waiting for the bus, the last 5 minutes of our lunch break - even during the toilet break!

On social media, we are sometimes tempted by a post and click on the link to the article. But the likelihood of us sticking around to see other content is limited by the limited time and the fact that the goal was to fill the wait or break with updates in the newsfeed, which we also return to immediately after reading the article.

The context and motives for clicking through to your pages are therefore crucial when analysing the reason for a high or low bounce rate.

Look at the critical pages first

On pages with a high bounce rate, you may want to prioritise your efforts based on whether the page contains business-critical CTAs or conversion.

On a conversion page where visitors need to click buy, sign up or request to be contacted, a high bounce rate is highly critical and the place where you should focus your efforts first.

There are many different reasons why a visitor bounces on the first page, and it takes an average visitor less than 5 seconds to decide if your site is worth their time. In just 5 seconds, we conclude whether we are likely to find the answers we are looking for and whether it will be a difficult task.

Therefore, your first task when you want to improve a site's bounce rate is to ask yourself these questions:

• What do I want the visitor to do when they land on the page?
• What information do I need to communicate to the visitor in order for them to take the desired action?

It's all about understanding the visitor's motives for visiting the site and at the same time eliminating doubts and scepticism and communicating the most important information with a simple design.

Clear CTA fields in contrasting colours also help improve the bounce rate because we quickly decode the design and intuitively act accordingly.

Cross-links to other content

If you have other content on your site that is in the same vein or otherwise relevant to the user's search intent, add a link and a teaser. A single click to another page on your site will positively affect the bounce rate.

Good page title and meta description

As mentioned, it's important that the page title and meta description (the title and text that appears when people search on Google) match the content you have on your site. The meta description is a sales text for your website, and if you try to sell something that doesn't fit, it often backfires - both in terms of bounce rate but also in terms of your Google ranking.

Offer something

A great tip to get users to stay on your website is to offer them something extra. This could be a newsletter sign up, a free e-book download or something else entirely.

Avoid a long load time

Users are impatient and don't want to wait for the website to load. Check your website speed with Google PageSpeed Insights, which also offers suggestions on how to improve speed.

Write clear texts

Condense your texts so that you only have relevant content on the page. Texts can be long, they just need to be relevant and set up in a reader-friendly way. Choose a font and font size that is easy to read and headlines that grab the user's attention.

Optimise navigation

Consider your content architecture and name menu items so that they are indicative of the content you land on. It's important that the site is easy and intuitive to navigate and place fields like "login" and "search" in the top right corner where it's natural for users to look for these features.