by
Charlie Spargo
The host of our Google Analytics training, Ethan Giles, novi.digital Senior Operations Manager, shares his insights into the realities of a good bounce rate.
Ethan provided a preview of the information covered on the Google Analytics course, and discussed how to understand bounce rates – and when you can know how good your own is.
The popular course helped ticket holders learn more about their customer base, and discover new audiences.
For those familiar with Google Analytics, one of the key pieces of data available is Bounce Rate.
It’s a great measure of how engaging your website is, how much people care about what you have to say, and what changes you need to make to your website or digital strategy. It can be a really useful indication of performance in the absence of conversion data.
A “bounce” is when a user visits a website and leaves without visiting another page or triggering any events on site.
If you were to enter a site and leave without any further on-site action, this would be recorded as a bounce. The Bounce Rate is calculated by taking all of the people that visited the site and bounced, and dividing that by the total number of visitors to the site.
If you have a Bounce Rate of 50%, this means half the people who came to your site left without doing anything further.
There are some caveats to Bounce Rate. For example, if somebody visits the site and spends 10 minutes reading everything on it, but they do not visit another page or trigger an event or conversion, then this would still count as a bounce.
This is because Google Analytics is unable to measure without some form of trigger. If somebody were to visit the site and simply see the phone number or email address, copy this down and then call or email whilst leaving the site – without other forms of tracking (such as call tracking) – this would also count as a bounce. This is despite the site performing its purpose.
Bounce Rate can be measured through all sorts of segments and filters. You can see Bounce Rates for individual pages, sources of traffic and even specific demographic information. This will allow you to look into the granular detail of how Bounce Rate is affected by different factors and allow you to make better informed decisions to improve the performance of your website.
If your Bounce Rate is 0%, this means no users bounce. If your Bounce Rate is 100%, everybody who visited bounced. Have a think and consider what a good Bounce Rate would be.
The answer is…
…It depends.
It’s nonsensical to offer any single benchmark as a good Bounce Rate. There are multiple factors that affect it, all particular to your context as a business or website. It’s like asking what a good amount of website traffic is or what is a good amount for company revenue – it’s going to depend on your particular circumstances.
Firstly, it is crucial to benchmark your Bounce Rate against yourself – this can either be benchmarking against previous performance or against an average.
For example, if you want to improve engagement on your site and last year your Bounce Rate was 90%, then achieving 80% Bounce Rate is good. If the Bounce Rate was 40% last year, then achieving 80% this year isn’t good! You should always aim to measure year-to-year, as this allows you to account for seasonality shifts in data – for example, the effects of public holidays.
Secondly, the purpose of the page must be considered. If the page is designed to encourage people to interact with the site, for example a blog with lots of links to further information or prompts to get in touch, then a lower Bounce Rate is better. If the page is just one big phone number designed to get people to pick up the phone, then naturally and preferably the Bounce Rate will be higher!
Here’s a quick overview :
