Great post Avinash!

This was the best breakdown of bounce rates I have read. I look forward to more posts on analytics from you.

Avinash interesting post, as I've been spending some time recently with Google Analytics and wasn't exactly sure what the 'Bounce Rate' was.

I have two areas of concern about the validity of the Bounce Rate, however;

1 - What if a visitor comes to your site, and then 'leaves immediately' by clicking on one of your feed subscription links? That would actually be a good thing, but to the Bounce Rate, it would look 'bad', right?

2 - Does traffic from search engines artificially inflate the Bounce Rate? We all know that using Google or Yahoo is still an inexact science, and when I am searching, often I will click on what I think is a site that will have the info I need, then as soon as I arrive, I realize it's not what I was looking for, and leave immediately. Have you noticed any type of correlation between a site having a lower Google Pagerank, and lower Bounce Rate as well? I would think that would be logical.

Either way, good info, and welcome to Daily Fix!

Mack: Glad you found the post to be of value (Ann deserves the thanks!).

Regarding concern #1:

> then 'leaves immediately' by clicking on
> one of your feed subscription links?

Yes they would be counted in Bounce Rate. But pretty much all tools now capture that data (exits from your own site using a link on your own site) and show it in the Top Exit Links or Top Destinations report.

So it should be easy for you to validate if your bounce rate is high becuase of "exit links". 99 times out of 10 (yes I am trying to be funny here) that won't be the case (unless exit links dominate your page).

Regarding concern #2

> Have you noticed any type of correlation between a site
> having a lower Google Pagerank, and lower Bounce Rate as well?

I have not noticed this personally but again this should be easy to validate.

Simply go to your Search Engine Referrals report (in GA it will look like my picture #1 above) and look at the bounce rate for your search engine traffic.

Now look at the overall bounce rate but also the bounce rate for your top keywords. Do this....

A] If the bounce rate is high (say greater than 25%) for your core brand / category terms then this is terrible. See where this traffic is landing, fix those pages (consider multivariate testing).

B] If the bounce rate is high and the key words or phrases are not what you were expecting then figure out why the search engine has indexed you for those key words. Use SEO to get rid of 'em, you really don't want the wrong traffic.

Excellent concerns, I hope this comment helps clarify.

-Avinash.

Avinash,

Thanks for the in-depth analysis. I have a question. You mentioned that a higher bounce rate could be a result of the referring website "not sending quality traffic." Could a higher bounce rate also be a result of your landing page not being particularly targeted for the surfers on the referring website? In other words, it may not be the quality of the traffic but rather the quality of the perceived value for that particular segment.

That is what I find so hard about many metrics – they often alert you to a problem but not readily to a solution. It’s like a mechanic telling you that you have “a problem” with your car but not specifying what the problem is, what caused it in the first place and more importantly how to fix it. With all this said, I still think it is valuable to look at general trends in metrics.

Thanks again for your thoughts and analysis.

Bill: There are ton's of metrics and they do a poor job of even telling you that there is a problem. Bounce Rate does that very well.

If you are paying for traffic (say on paid search campaigns, email marketing, or other direct marketing campaigns) then I think it is also a good indicator of the quality of traffic you are getting for your money.

But your site could totally be letting you down. Hence recommendation #3 above. Let's go look at where this high bounce rate traffic is landing and do something about it. Multivariate testing for example. Or click on the link about how to measure effectiveness of a page in my post (the very last one).

Hope this helps.

Awesome discussion, I am loving my first post!! :)

-Avinash.

Avinash - very interesting post ...

I've been looking at similar data for some time now, and completely agree that while the bounce rate does not provide the answer necessarily, it does provide a great indication of what the marketing team needs to focus on improving!!

I was very interested to see your benchmark data ... "it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying." ... and am wondering whether others have found that similar benchmarks are appropriate?

Hi Avinash,

Thanks for writing such a needed, articulate post. I, like Mack, had the same question that he posed in his second point. Thanks for addressing that. I also have another observation. As marketing & PR consultants to design firms, we don't get too upset about high bounce rates in many cases. For instance: there are very many graphic design firms and we feel their web sites' home pages have to further qualify their areas of specialization in a way that the search engines can't easily do. Thus, if a design firm specializes in offering a number of specific graphic design services, and a potential client is seeking graphic design services, the home page should further qualify that the firm does or does not offer the kinds of services that particular client needs. For the clients whose needs are obviously not going to be met by some of the graphic design firms in their region (as my cited example), bounce rates will be higher. However, this saves everybody's time in the long run if we can narrow, better qualify and match clients to services right on the home pages. This also makes it unnecessary for potential clients to dig further into web sites to determine whether there is a fit of services to their needs or not.

Lastly, a warm welcome to the Daily Fix community. It's going to be a pleasure to read your posts.

Great post, very helpful. One thing which would make it even better would be if you could give the name of the Google Analytics report you are showing in each instance. I can't seem to find that last one with just url/pageviews/bouncerate data.

Joe: Good idea.

#1: Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites -> Click the 3rd icon in Views (on top of the table on the right) -> Under "individual performance metric" choose bounce rate.

#2: Traffic Sources -> AdWords -> AdWords Campaigns -> Under the Segment drill down (on top of the table) click Ad Content -> Click the 3rd icon in Views (on top of the table on the right) -> Under "individual performance metric" choose bounce rate.

#3: Content -> Top Content (or Content by Title) -> Take a screenshot of the table -> Put it into Powerpoint / Picassa -> Crop the image to create a small table that fits a blog template. (!!!) :)

Sorry that last table is cropped simply for visual effect.

Great suggestion, thank you.

-Avinash.

great job!

How is Bounce Rate effected by Spider activity? We are having trouble with our metrics and the amount of Spidering we've been encountering lately by Yahoo.

Mona:

> How is Bounce Rate effected by Spider activity?

No matter what program you are using should be filtering out spider data, hence it won't affect your bounce rate computation.

If you use web logs then your program might automatically be filtering spiders out.

If you are using the more common javascript tag based data collection then spider activity is a non-issue since spiders (mostly) don't execute javascript tags.

In summary spidering is good for you becuase you are getting indexed. Your web analytics tool should throw that data away (unless you want to report on spider activity).

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

Hi Avinash,
I need to upgrade my daily fix after reading the bounce rate breakdown.

Vijay

I think when considering one's bounce rate you should also take in to consideration how your posts are displayed on your index. If you show your entire posts on your index and don't have a "read more" link. A user could technically read 4-5 of your articles and then "bounce" That is not as bad as if you just had summaries and a user bounced.

Also if you don't have sumarries many of your repeat visitors who are up do date with your content may only need to read your most recent post or two b/c they have already read everything else. So they may read the newest posts on the index page and then bounce like flubber or a bad check.

Just some things to keep in mind. but nice post!

Great post, very insightful!

The analysis was good; I have noticed that bounced rates of 40-50% being fairly common across websites of different sizes and in several sectors; giving me the feeling that just as we seem to have come up with some 'generally accepted' figures for CTR and conversion rates, a 40-50% bounce rate is acceptable (albeit not desirabe).

Excellent introduction to what bounce rate numbers mean! Thanks for such an informative post. Something I've noticed on my site is a high number of referrals from Google image search that have the highest bounce rates out of any other group. This makes my hits go up, which seems like a good thing until I look at that bounce rate!

Another great post, Avinash. Looking forward for more such posts on GA.

Good article. I just started looking at bounce through rates on my own site and evaluating how to better move people from their landing page to the pages that form the basis of my business..

Although bounce rate is a good indicator for traffic that lands on your home page we shouldn't forget that some traffic is driven directly into the end point and thus will usually show higher bounce rates.
For example we in FixYa provide technical support, if a visitor is looking for help and drops in the HP he might need to spend some time surfing the site, however if he lands on the exact thread that deals with his problem, he probably has better places to go than continue to view other pages in the site

Did you say what the definition of the Google Analytics Bounce Rate stat is (short time or only 1 page)? It seems that most blogs are laid out so that many visitors will read just the first page. In this case, a short time Bounce Rate is more helpful. The About This Report blurb on the GA page just says that a high bounce rate indicates that a landing page should be redesigned. Thanks for the post.

Where can you find the info regarding fraudulent clicks or how?

This is indeed a great and very much needed post. Well done.
I am just strugling with a couple of points, so any clarification would be most welcome.

1) Absolute unique visitors:
How can we get this total to exclude the 'bounced' unique visitors?

2) Still not clear if we are able to use the GA filters to determine our own criteria for defining what a 'bounced' visit should be; i.e. if visitors access just 1 page AND under 'x' seconds then = bounce

3) Option to create reports that exclude bounced visits entirely?

best wishes,

- Vincent

Hello Avi

Quite an insightful!

Could you also share your thoughts on when %Exit is coupled with Bounce Rate? What is the inference that we can draw from it?

One other observation that one came across higher traffic results in Higher bounce rate. But if the volume of traffic is lower the bounce rate reduces significantly - especially in an ecom site, it would result in higher conversion.

Thanks for this article . I was really confused about the bounced rate of my site whether
my site higher bounce rate is good for my site or not .. But now i am knowing thanks alot ...

Avinash,

As I've said, I'm learning to love the bounce rate metric! But I think it needs some clarification.

After our recent conversation (offline) I thought it would be appropriate to share my discovery that, in Google Analytics, Bounce Rate does not seemingly measure traffic coming from other pages of the site, since by visiting multiple pages they've already not bounced. It only measures the traffic coming to a specific page as the first page they see in a given website and among those visitors takes the percentage of immediate departures from the site as the bounce rate %.

I found it very confusing when I would see high bounce rate % and yet also see a nice $ index. How could this be? because lots of other non-bouncable traffic visited that page and purchased stuff. Just not the traffic that directly viewed that page first, from an external source.

Hope that's even somewhat lucid.

Nate Sidmore

Hi,

The bounce rate for my website is very high--57%. However, I want to know if this has anything to do with the type of website you have. Our website is about DRIP investing, a dry subject. How much does the content matter? How would I know if it isn't the norm for all financial websites of the kind to have such a bounce rate?

Thanks

What about pages that have 100% and 0% bounce rates in Content Overview? Does bounce rate tell us that 100% (all) of the people instantly leave and that 0% signifies that everyone stays on the page? This is a little hard to grasp due to having the same page listed as 100% and 0% respectively, the only difference being content.

Avinash, I have a question about one of your comments:
> Yes they would be counted in Bounce Rate.
> But pretty much all tools now capture that data
> (exits from your own site using a link on your own site)
> and show it in the Top Exit Links or Top Destinations report.

Does GA include these reports? I can't find them. They have Top Exit Pages, but that is not the same thing.

Hi!
Very useful information. I do have a question though...
What if you site has only one page... let's say it is a flash site. Than bounce rate isn't really realistic, is it? People could check your entire page but still they are only marked as if they only came and went? How can i get more accurate info?
Thanks... Jure.

I just started using GA and I really appreciate your valuable information... really helped me understand the numbers GA shows me...

thanks a lot!
christoph

Hi,

Thanks for the info. I just wandered here while checking my Analytics and inquisite to know on the Bounce rates. I get a picture clear sorting for the Help.

Cheers!
-ilaxi

Hi!
Very useful information. I do have a question though...
What percentage should be for Referring Sites for better response of website...
How can i get more accurate info?
Thanks... khushboo.

Avinash, great info and elloquently put. Most of us infoprenuers must use our stats to drive performance and thus monitization. I was going to write an explination on bounce rates and was doing some research...found your site...decided to scratch the idea...your explanation is so perfect!

Great article! I did an experiment recently with Stumbleupon (http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/stumbleupon-my-experiment-to-increase-website-traffic-using-stumbleuponcom/)
and while my traffic shot through the roof, the quality of the traffic was awful...literally a 99% bounce rate. I haven't seen any other articles note that while social bookmarking might get you traffic, it's not getting quality traffic.
Jill

Bounce rates differ too with blogs and sites with a spread of topics. If you have a blog that takes about a mix of subjects then a visitor may find you on one topic via Google, but not want to move onto another one since it solves the problem they have.

The desired bounce rate differs depending on your content.

I appreciate the article very much, too. I was worried about our company website, because the bounce rate was between 35-50% and now I see it is not so bad. Now I'm making a magazine. So my question is what means "depending of contents"? Do you think that magazine needs much lower bounce rate, than almost catalogue web site?

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This is very helpful, but still doesn't explain the following statistics: Page visit 30, bounce rate 100% time on page 2.6 minutes.

How can the bounce rate means the visitor just left after few second.

Just made a little discovery for myself and to share with you. To illustrate: A page visit count for a particular page is 60, bounce rate is 85% and time on page is 1.2 minutes. In this case the bounce rate refer only to this page when it is a landing page from an external source and in this case it was only 20 visits out of the 60. The other 40 visits came from other pages within the website and in fact the visitor stayed much longer time on the site and sometimes up to two hours including visiting this particular page.

So, it seems that the content itself is not an issue, but possibly the design as a landing page is for some visitors coming "fresh" to it.

Hope this of use.

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