What is Your Bounce Rate?

Why is your bounce rate an important thing to keep an eye on, and better yet what the heck is your web site bounce rate? I will answer those questions and let you know the best ways to lower your bounce rate and get people staying on your web site a little ‘bit longer.

What is the Bounce Rate?

Your bounce rate is a term used in web site traffic analysis to represent the percentage of initial visitors who move on to a new web site, leaving yours.  In a perfect world, you want that number to be as low as possible.  The reason for this is that the lower your bounce rate is, the longer people are staying on your web site and not going elsewhere.

Judging what the bounce rate is might be difficult.  Some web analytic software will include it with your tracking information (for example, Google Analytics) however some might not.

How Can Should I Interpret the Bounce Rate Data?

For static web sites, a bounce rate of anything under 40% or so would be concerning.  However, with blog or web sites where linking to other web sites is common place, anywhere from 50% to 60% should be considered normal. 

Now, how can you lower your bounce rate? 

• Make sure your web site is loading as quickly as possible
• Give people internal links that will lead them to other areas of interests
• Provide an easy way to get back to the front page
• Shorten your pages or using excerpts if needed

One more bit of advice to throw your way would be don’t grow disconcerted if you don’t see instant lowering of your bounce rate.  Make some modifications if needed, and then give it a few weeks and see if you can see any difference in how people are interacting with your web site.

As long as you are providing good content, and you have pruned things design-wise down to the essentials, your bounce rate should lower, which means you will have visitors staying on your web site for longer periods of time.