Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Example: A rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your homepage is boring or off-putting. But… is this really the case?
Properly maintaining and updating your website can do wonders for your business. In fact, an online presence is seen by many as almost crucial these days. More and more can now be accomplished online, including banking, shopping, socialising, entertaining oneself, planning a trip and staying in touch with loved ones. With so much going on online, it’s clear that being a part of it all is probably going to get you places.
Image courtesy of Morberg
Figuring out how people are perceiving and using your site will help you get a better grip on how it needs to adapt in order to grow. Enter web analytics.
Using software such as Google Analytics, ClickTale and StatCounter, you can determine how many people are visiting your site, how they are navigating it, where these people are from, which pages they prefer and lots more. Such valuable insight means that you can begin to understand where the problem areas are, and then make the appropriate adjustments to your site in order to improve it and reach more people.
Bounce rate reflects the percentage of people who, seemingly, found themselves on one of your website’s pages, looked at only one page and left, without clicking through to other areas of the site (that is, if the option was there to do so).
But, what classifies as a high/low bounce rate? Says Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, in his blog Excellent Analytics Tip #11: Measure Effectiveness Of Your Web Pages, “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis.”
However, it’s important to understand the various factors that have an effect on bounce rate, as well as those that may render it deceptive.
A bounce is recorded when a visitor to your website clicks on a link to a page on a different site, enters a new URL and leaves your site in their dust, closes the window or tab they are using to access your site, clicks back to another site or page, or after a session timeout is detected (meaning no activity has been recorded on your page for a certain amount of time, and a new ‘session’ is begun).
What many people don’t realise is that a high bounce rate may in fact be a good thing – depending on what your site was designed to accomplish.
A bounce rate should always be considered relevant to the nature of your site’s objectives. If a person is able to find what they are looking for after viewing only one page of your site, then perhaps a high bounce rate is exactly what you want to be seeing.
For example: Amy is looking for information about a hotel she wants to stay at. She types the name of the hotel into her search engine of choice, and is directed to an entry on your tourism website with everything she needs to know available on a single page. She is unlikely to go any further, as she has found what she is looking for and has three YouTube videos of cats in dress-up playing the piano to get through before her next meeting. This reliance on search engines to navigate quickly to one specific area of a website and then leave just as quickly is referred to as ‘snacking’.
Alternatively, Amy found herself on your site’s home page and was delighted to instantly come across the summary of a featured entry boasting the hotel’s number. Making a mental note to visit your site again, she might decide to leave your home page, grateful that she has found the information she was looking for, without progressing any further.
It’s also important to note that sites such as blogs and index platforms are likely to produce high bounce rates, because the bulk of the site’s content, or most information of importance, can often be found on one page by default – there’s no where else to navigate to.
SEO analyst and president of New York based internet consulting firm Atlas Web Service, Michael Gray, makes another important observation.
“If you were concerned only with bounce rate,” he says in his blog, “you might kick pages with high bounce rate into the ‘low quality’ bucket and schedule them for a rewrite or deletion. However, what you really need to do is look at time spent on a page as well. You may see that people are spending a lot of time on those pages. Because they are reading them, the pages do have some value.”
If your website is serving its purpose, then bounce rate may not be as important as its made out to be. In this fast-paced digital era, unless they’re procrastinating wildly, people don’t want to spend lengthly amounts of time wandering around your site searching for the information they need. If this information is made intentionally available on a single entry page, you can’t blame them for enjoying that page, and that page alone, and then moving on.
Of course, if your site is truly meant to draw people in and make them aware of information to be accessed on various pages in one sitting, then bounce rate may be something to make a mental note of. In this case, keeping your typical user in mind, and creating a navigation system that appeals to a desire to find things quickly and efficiently, will help keep your bounce rate happy.
The Search Engine Journal suggests a number of factors to consider with regards to bounce rate, including:
- Web design and usability – is your site appealing and easy for people to want to explore your site further?
- Website content – are you putting information of importance in the right places? Is this information easily accessible?
- Navigation – does your website offer a clear and intuitive navigation system? Are people likely to be put off going any further because they are confused?
- Search Engine Optimisation – is your website SEO friendly? Are people being directed to your site for the correct reasons and using the correct key words?
Other factors to consider are the distractions of pop-up adverts, streaming music (navigating to a page only to have it start singing loudly at you while you’re at work tends to raise a few eyebrows), too may links to other sites (you’re not doing yourself any favours) and age-inappropriate (or just plain inappropriate) content… all of which are capable of pushing people off your page faster than that damn cat in dress-up is able to play Chopsticks on the piano. Seriously… how does he do that?
Being aware of how your website places in the greater scheme of things, and how you may need to adapt it to please people’s preference for ‘snacking’ may be the solution when it comes to lowering a perceivably unruly bounce rate. Removing low quality content and pages with little engagement value from your site might also be a step in the right direction.
All of this said, is your bounce rate something to worry about or not?
Consider the following example…
A website for a local tourism authority aims to provide tourists with quick summaries of information for various local attractions, but the pages are reflecting high bounce rates. Is this cause for concern?
Because the site’s purpose is to provide visitors with single indexed pages of information, it is likely that they will be able to find everything they are looking for on a single page. Perhaps they heard about a specific attraction, want to visit it but need the contact details to make a booking. Perhaps they were directed to that page by a search engine, or sent the link to it via a friend.
If someone gave you a tourist’s guide to sightseeing and attractions in a city you were visiting, would you sit down and read the book from cover to cover, or would you scroll through the index and read only the pages you were interested in, shutting the book each time you’d visited a page so you could go and visit what you had just read about?
It makes sense that, having conveniently obtained the information they needed (a contact number, address or quick rating), visitors will move on, thus increasing the page’s bounce rate even though the website is successfully serving its original purpose.
Examining the amount of time spent on key pages (by noting the statistics for “Average time spent on page”), in relation to bounce rate, would be one way of confirming this. Paying attention to the average number of pages per visit would also help you determine just how much of your site people are taking an interest in. However, once again, the purpose of the site must be taken into consideration – is a visitor meant to spend large amounts of time on a page, or was it intended to provide quick and easily accessible information?
Sources
G-Squared Interactive (GSQi) Internet Marketing Services and Solutions online
Digital River developer resource
Graywolf’s SEO blog
The Search Engine Journal
Oxford Dictionaries online
Occam’s Razor