What is bounce rate?
The bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who left your site after viewing just one page, without taking any further action like – visiting another page on your website, signing up for the newsletter, filling out a form, or making a purchase.
They don't click on anything else or visit a second page on the site.
How to calculate bounce rate?
To calculate the bounce rate of your website or a page, divide the ‘number of single page visits’ by the ‘number of total visits on the site’ and multiply by 100. The bounce rate can be easily tracked using Google Analytics.
Formula for calculating bounce rate
Real-life example of bounce rate
Understand bounce rate with an example:
If there were 1,000 visitors on your site last week and 150 of them only visited a single page (the one they clicked on). Then, your bounce rate will be: 150 / 1000 x 100 = 15%
This number will keep changing over time so it’s better to track the bounce rates with an analytics provider like, Google Analytics.
What’s considered a good bounce rate? (benchmark)
The average bounce rate for most websites ranges between 26% and 70%. But bounce rates can vary significantly based on your industry and where your traffic comes from.
For example, Custom Media Labs found that different types of websites had completely different Bounce Rates.
The average bounce rate can also vary depending on the device the viewer is using. Mobile devices, for instance, have the highest bounce rate across all industries at 51%. Whereas the average bounce rate on a desktop is 43%. So it’s important to consider your traffic sources when judging your bounce rate.
If your bounce rate is over 90%, then your website immediately needs your attention.
Bounce Rate may be used as a Google ranking factor. In fact, one industry study found that bounce rate was closely correlated to first-page Google rankings. However, this isn't proved yet.
Ways to decrease your bounce rate
- Improve your site’s loading speed: A Google analysis of 11 million landing pages found that slow loading speed correlated with higher Bounce Rates. Some best practices to increase your site’s loading speed are – using compressed images, reducing redirects, caching web pages, etc.
- Optimize your site for mobile users: More than half of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices. That means, your site should work well on mobile phones to decrease bounce rates. Having easy and clear navigation, large fonts, and responsive images are some practices you can follow.
- Craft skimmable content: Visitors are in a hurry and only scan through your page. So if they don’t find what they’re looking for as fast as possible, they’ll bounce. You need to follow best practices to make your content easy to read to retain and convert your visitors.