Definition of Bounce Rate

Bounce is a short single-page session on your website, without any other user activity registered. A bounce rate is a percentage of those visits compared to all the visits on the site and is included in the most common metrics of, for example, Google Analytics.

Why is measuring bounce rate important?

A high bounce rate may be caused by the bad quality of the page – not appropriate content, poorly designed user experience, or interface which leads to a decrease of interest of your potential and existing customers. Moreover, such a website will be low-rated in Google ranking making it difficult to reach new audiences. By measuring bounce rate you can uncover what pieces of content do not match users' search intent or are hard to grasp. By knowing those pain points, your team can act on them – improving the overall user experience of your website.

What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?

Bounce doesn’t refer to all the exit events on your website, just the ones that happened soon after landing on the initial page. Exit rate is a different thing and it is a percentage of site exits from a specific place on your site, having visited other pages before.

When analyzing why your visitors leave so quickly it is important to focus on different scenarios and take into consideration different types of leaving the website.

Not always high bounce rate is bad – some pages (i.e. landing pages) are designed as a single-page site, so there won’t be any further website traffic on such ones.

How to improve bounce rate?

If you have prepared important content on your site and you would like your visitors to crawl pages and spend more time there, you should think about how to improve your bounce rate. What are the most common reasons people bounce

• They don’t find the desired information – maybe they’ve visited your website by mistake, so the question is why they were redirected to your page. This may be due to incorrect content which causes bad positioning.
• They don’t find the information, even if it is there – the website has bad UX and links are not clear enough, so people get easily frustrated and leave the page.
• They’ve found the information, but it is uninteresting – try to keep your content engaging and attractive. For example, videos reduce bouncing, increasing the average time spent on the site by 2 minutes (according to Wistia research).
• They’ve found interesting information but the page is too slow – the loading time of your website is a very important factor. People are impatient and will leave your website very quickly if it takes a lot of time to load your page.