What your bounce rate says about your website

The bounce rate is an internet related term used for a form of measuring web traffic. It refers to people who visit a website and then bounce, or leave the site, instead of going on to view other pages within the same site.

Bounce rate calculation

As there are a number of terms used in internet marketing, it is easy to confuse the bounce rate with other forms of measurements. "Bounce rate, does that mean clickthrough or exit rate?" is a common query. Clickthough (CTR) is more to do with online advertisements and the exit rate is measures how many people exited the website from a specific page. It does not matter if the user actively clicked through the website before exiting or just exited on the first page. So what does Google mean when they talk about bounce rates? The bounce rate for a single page is calculated by taking the number of people who enter a site at that page and leave within a specified timeout period without going to another page on the website and divide that by the total number of visitors who entered the website at that page. The bounce rate for a website is found by taking the number of website visitors who log on to only a single page and dividing that by the total number of website visitors. So this is what is being discussed when you hear the term bounce rates from Google analytics.

High or low?

Bounce rates are generally used to work out the effectiveness of a particular page of entry. If the bounce rate is low, it means the page has succeeded in drawing visitors further into the website. It is a useful tool for gathering visitors' reactions to your webpage. However, what is metrics of this nature used for? The relevance of this type of performance depends on the type of website in question. On some websites, it is possible to find all the information you need on the first page so there is no need to delve deeper into the site. In these circumstances, the owners are unlikely to be too concerned with a high bounce rate but some search engines may not be impressed and place the site lower down in the pecking order of relevance. If you're a website owner and need to improve your rate, there are three useful tips you can implement to reduce those bounces. First of all make the website easy to navigate. Next, improve the quality of the content, make it more informative or interesting and finally make sure that the page loads quickly or visitors may be tempted to move on before all the information is displayed.