So you kick up Google Analytics, as I do nearly every day, and take a
look at the myriad of stats provided to you. You get visits,
pageviews, time on site, etc., all with pretty straightforward
meanings. But what about bounce rate? This measures the percentage of
people who go to your site, look at one page, then leave. This is a
confusing stat for most people, who either a) misinterpret it or b)
disregard it as useless. It is, however, an extremely important stat
that you must take into account as a measure of your advertising
strategies and the quality of your blog’s content.
When we examine bounce rate, we must consider it in two different
places: the home page or other navigation pages, and actual content
pages. The former is where the true analysis lies. When people arrive
at the latter, that is pages with actual posts on them, the bounce
rate will be high merely because people will visit your site from
Google or other sources for the content itself, and nothing else. They
therefore will be less likely to navigate anywhere else on your site.
However, on navigation pages, people are looking to find content on
your site specifically, and if they don’t find any and leave, this can
tell you a lot about your website.
One thing this tells you is that your advertising strategies are bad,
meaning the way you try and drive visitors to your website fails in
getting readers and merely generates what is called “bad traffic”. You
want readers in the end, and this stat tells you they are not coming
in. Common reasons advertising would fail in this regard is with
traffic generation sites, which force or provide benefit for visiting
sites or not much else (Entrecard, Blogexplosion, etc.), or a
mistargeted ad scheme. If you believe this may be the case, adjust
your strategy to get what you want, or you’re just wasting money or
time. Another thing this may tell you is that your content is just
bad. If people are looking for content on your site, and are
dissatisfied with what they see, they will leave. This could be either
due to the above effects, that of bad advertising strategies, bad
titling, or bad writing. This means you must improve your style or
topic choices to better entice readers to look for more and eventually
come back.
To conclude, though bounce rate is a confusing stat, it is important.
It tells you a lot about how you try and market your site and how your
site is in and of itself. Low bounce rate means more pageviews, which
means more ad impressions, which, even for those bloggers which are
not driven by the passion for writing but a desire for income, is a
good thing also. When you look at your analytics page, don’t dismiss
bounce rate, embrace it.
What is your bounce rate? What do you do to help lower your bounce rate?
When I started my music blog back in 2008 and saw very high bounce rates like 90% or 100%, and read the Google definition I was freaked out. I tried things like not auto-playing music etc. The bounce rates never really changed. With the explanation and the comments above, I feel much better. Most of my traffic is direct from Google search to a page about a specific rock band. The visitor reads the blog entry and possibly watches a video and then leaves. This can easily result in a high bounce rate. Of course, I would like the visitor to click other pages, but they got the information they needed and left.
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It also depends on what your blog is about. Mine is an entertainment news blog that features a lot of videos on the homepage as updates, so most people who visit only view the latest from the homepage and then move on. That is why I also have a lot of ads on the homepage so they can click off from those. My bounce rate is high at 68% but expected.
Thanks for the tip. My bounce rate hovers at 60% and I am not sure if it is good or bad! This blogging thing is harder than I thought!
http://historywasneverlikethat.blogspot.com/
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I don't really know what bounce rate is. Thanks for sharing this information. Indeed, it is important specially if you want to know if your blog is hitting our target number of hits or if your blog is getting good and quality traffic.
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I really have had trouble with bounce rates on all of my sites, as most of my traffic comes from Search Engines the bounce rate tends to be pretty high. Embedding video tutorials and engaging your readers with questions are some good ways to reduce bounce rates.
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Start with your homepage. Think about the old adage that “first impressions are the most important”.
Let’s say your website was so perfectly optimized and you got a boat load of organic traffic to your deep pages, actually giving the user what they’re looking for.
Wouldn’t you think your bounce rate would go up, and your pageviews per visitor would go down?
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From which percentage of bounce rate should i start worrying about my website?
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What percent of bounce rate would you say is bad. At the moment I’ve got 68%. Is that good or bad?
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Glad I read this post. I just started using Google Analytics a little over a month ago and was not sure what Bounce Rate was exactly.
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There’s an interesting theory about bounce rate, it says that if the bounce rate is high, it is good because the visitors will click your adsense fast to exit from your site
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Not bad at all. I think one thing that seperates my bounce rates is the fact that I have a bunch of links on my home page either pointing to my affiliate sites or blogs. This makes it increasingly difficult to understand what my bounce rate means. To figure it out I measure my bounce rate on google anaylitcs with my exit link activity on stat counter. LOL talk about a head ache. Anyway good job explaining bounce rates.
Good point to see what pages are making people bounce. I don’t mind if they bounce off the inside pages…it usually means they clicked on an ad
But I will have to check how my regular visitors who come straight to my homepage are doing…could mean I need to post more frequently.
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I’m not too sure on this issue. I always thought bounce rate was a measure of time. For instance, if I click on your site and hit the back button immediately, then that would be an increase in bounce rate.
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thanks udegbunam, i just deleted and marked his comment as spam.