Bounce rate seems like a straightforward metric, but the moment you scratch it’s surface, things get murky. Even the definition is murky. The Google Analytics help center defines bounce rate as “the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).” That seems pretty straightforward, until you learn that your Google Analytics reports don’t precisely reflect that definition. Bounce rate also doesn’t track scrolling, which is one of the key ways people interact with a page. Someone could land on one of your blog posts, read it all the way through, and then click back to the search results. That visitor would be defined as a bounce.
There are other examples of how murky bounce rate buy Phone Number List can be, but I’ll spare you the SEO hairsplitting. The important thing to know, and really the only thing you need to know is that bounce rate is a relative measurement. All you need is a bounce rate lower than your competitors.
How to find out what you site’s bounce rate is
You can see the bounce rate for your entire site from the Dashboard view of your analytics account. Google will give you the bounce rate for each individual page pretty much anytime you see a listing of pages. You can also go to the far left navigation column, find “Behavior” > “Site Content > “All Pages” and you’ll see something like this (without the arrows, of course):
BounceRateAnalyticsADJ
Here’s how to find the bounce rate for your site’s most visited pages. The left arrow shows where to find this view in the Analytics navigation. The right arrow points out the bounce rate column in the report.
Average bounce rates for different kinds of sites and devices
Before you panic about what you see in your Analytics account, consider this:
bouncerateBySiteTypeQuickSprout
Bounce rate varies widely across different types of websites. This segment of the infographic “How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate” from QuickSprout shows bounce rates from 10% to 90% depending on the site type.
If that’s not enough to make you feel better, check out RocketFuel’s graph showing bounce rates across different device types:
averagebounceratebydevicetype620
Remember: Bounce rate is relative. All that really matters is that your site’s bounce rate is lower than your competitors’. Just to make sure it is, here are the most common causes of high bounce rates and how to fix them:
1. You’ve got a single page site.
This is obviously going to make people less likely to click to another page… because there is no other page. You’ll also see this cause of high bounce rates for landing pages. You can see it right above in the bounce rate averages image from QuickSprout. Landing pages have average bounce rates of 70 to 90%.
But can you still get the bounce rate down? We’ll address a lot of these fixes later in more detail, but for starters, make sure your page looks good on mobile devices, loads fast, and has a clear call to action. If you’re still seeing a bounce rate of more than 90% consider refining the flow of traffic to this page, or consider adjusting the site to better suit that stream of traffic.
2. Google Analytics is not installed correctly.
This happens more often than you’d think. If you have an extremely high (over 90%) or extremely low (less than 10%) bounce rate, make sure your Google Analytics installation hasn’t gotten messed up somehow. Look for radical drops or jumps in your bounce rate from one day to the next
10 Ways to Reduce the Bounce Rate on Your Website
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