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Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a beginner, it is universally understood that high bounce rate is bad news. A high bounce rate is particularly alarming because it signals that visitors are not finding your website helpful. They aren’t finding answers to their questions and are leaving quickly.
Google Analytics is great at displaying your bounce rate front-and-center. It’s waiting for you each time you check into your account. It’s Google’s way of showcasing how important this figure is and that it should not be ignored.
While investigating bounce rate issues may not be the most comfortable of tasks, it should be a priority. Instead of viewing a high bounce rate as a problem, you can think of it as a significant opportunity for improvement!
This article will discuss:
Let’s get started.
When someone visits your website and doesn’t take any sort of action on the page before leaving, this is known as a bounce. Thus, your bounce rate is a percentage of the people that landed on your website, but did nothing on the page they entered.
Not taking action includes clicking on a link to another page, pressing a “read more” button, making a search on your website, filling out any type of questionnaire or info request, etc. Because no action was taken, the Google Analytics server doesn’t receive a trigger.
A high bounce rate can be an alarm bell that your website isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. It means that there is no engagement on the page and the visit ended with a single page view. For this reason, bounce rate is often used to measure the quality of a landing page.
You can also use bounce rate to judge the quality of your audience. Sometimes, it isn’t the landing page that’s the problem, but you are targeting the wrong persona! You may be attracting visitors that just aren’t relevant to your website and its offerings.
The bounce rate of every page on your site will contribute to your website’s overall bounce rate.
Exploring what is a bounce rate in Google Analytics starts with how the tool calculates a site’s bounce rate (or a single page’s bounce rate). This will help you understand how your own bounce rate is compiled and give you a more complete comprehension of this key metric.
According to Google:
Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.
In other words:
If you have 100 visitors to your website (total sessions), and 11 of these visits bounce (a single-page session), then your bounce rate is 11/100, or 11%.
If you want to calculate the bounce rate of an individual page, the math is very similar. The big difference is that you are looking at single page sessions that start and end on a page and dividing it by the total number of sessions that start with this page.
Let’s say you have a landing page connected to a PPC search ad. After 50 people click your ad and arrive at this landing page, 5 exit without engaging. This landing page has a bounce rate of 10% (5/50).
To get a full understanding of your website’s bounce rates, you need to use Google Analytics. This service will track how visitors engage and move about your website, which allows you to not only count the total number of unique sessions, but also how many visitors bounce.
You can use Google Analytics to measure bounce rates of individual pages, or your total average bounce rate across your entire website. Again, your average site bounce rate is found by taking the total number of single-page sessions (bounces) and dividing it by the total number of sessions on your site.
As you can see from the above image, Google Analytics doesn’t just stop at bounce rates. You can use it to see:
And that’s just from the Google Analytics home dashboard!
While there’s plenty more to explore in Google Analytics, these few metrics (users, sessions, bounce rate, session duration, etc.) are incredibly important and should be looked at in relation to one another.
For example, if you note that you have a relatively high bounce rate, but also your average session duration is long, it may not be a bad site experience. Users are finding everything they need on the page and don’t need to engage further or explore other parts of your site.
Comparing sessions to users is also helpful. Since users are the total number of unique, new visitors in the specified time period, and sessions is the total visits, you can surmise that the difference between these two metrics is how many repeat visitors you have.
If your bounce rate is high and session durations are low, then it’s a big red flag. Not only are people not engaging or exploring your site any further, but they are also leaving in a big hurry! That’s when you need to investigate the reasons behind these troubling metrics and find ways to lower your bounce rates and extend duration times.
There are a lot of different ways to view bounces and what they mean for your website. At the core, tracking bounces allows you to understand how people interact with individual pages on your site.
Using these insights, you can better optimize pages so that visitors perform those key marketing actions that your business needs to grow. This is especially important for landing pages, where you have invested time and money towards getting people on these pages to perform a conversion activity.
When bounce rates are particularly high on a landing page, it may mean that:
Not necessarily. There are a few cases where lots of bounces are not a bad thing. In fact, it may be a sign of a successful page performing its necessary function. For instance, if a visitor lands on your contact page, then a bounce doesn’t mean that they didn’t engage. They may have found your business’ phone number or email and contacted you elsewhere.
The same is true of content pages, like blog posts. Typically, people will come to these pages, absorb the information of the article and then close the site. Because Google Analytics never receives a second trigger, it counts this session as a bounce.
In reality, the content was effective! The user read the entire article and found it useful. It answered their question so they clicked back to whatever else they were doing. Ideally, you would hope that they would read more articles or sign up for a newsletter, but that doesn’t mean that the page has failed.
It all comes down to what the intent is for the page or website. If the intent of the page is to inform, then a high bounce rate isn’t problematic, especially if session durations are good.
Bounce rates really become an issue when the success of your website (and your business) depends on users visiting multiple pages in a visit. This is common for an ecommerce business, where customers are expected to go through some form of a sales funnel, such as:
Homepage → Product Page → Shopping Cart → Checkout
The same is true of a B2B business that uses its website as a lead generation tool. You’re hoping that prospects will land on your page, explore your offerings, and leave their contact information. This process involves multiple steps and any bounces represent people that did not complete the desired chain.
In the above examples, it is easy to differentiate cases where it is better to have a low bounce rate versus a high one. But, what happens when your overall site has a higher than expected bounce rate? Is it time to panic, or is this okay because you have lots of content pages that are expected to have high bounces?
Instead of immediately sounding the alarm when your site-wide bounce rate is high, take a look at each individual page, particularly those that have the highest rates. Then, look at those other key site metrics alongside it and determine if:
As you look at all the data, you may come across cases where the site has a high bounce rate and low session times. This means people aren’t engaging at all. These are the problematic pages that need to be fixed, even if it only makes a moderate improvement on your overall site bounce rate.
The more time you put towards this activity of analyzing individual page bounce rates and finding the ones with the biggest issues, the better optimized your site will become.
Exit rate is another metric with a similar function to bounce rate, so it is common for marketers and site owners to confuse the two. There are some key differences to help explain the two.
In example, if someone lands on your homepage, then navigates to a product category, finds an interesting product, but then leaves the site, this is an exit.
If a visitor comes to your ecommerce site’s homepage and never navigates elsewhere before leaving the site, this is a bounce.
When landing pages experience high bounce rates, it is a problem that directly affects your conversions. These people are leaving without performing the desired marketing action that you need them to complete to generate revenue and grow your business.
It’s twice as bad when it is a landing page coming from a PPC ad because you’ve paid your cost-per-click bid amount. You’ve invested some amount of money on this ad traffic coming to your landing page. If that page isn’t converting traffic, this is money wasted!
In this respect, bounce rate can be a measure of success on landing pages. When you make a change to a landing page experience, you can use bounce rates to judge whether it was a wise or unwise move.
For instance, if you change the layout to a landing page and you see a spike in bounces for the page, then you know that this change brought the quality of the experience down. The same is true of the reverse. If less people are bouncing, then you know that the change is helping the page engage audiences.
You can also try to compare your best and worst performing pages, in terms of conversions and bounces. What do your best pages tell you about successful landing page experiences? How can you use these insights to help your pages with unusually high bounce rates?
Conversely, what do your worst pages tell you about user behaviors? Answering this question may help you avoid problematic bounce rates in the future.
You can also look at conversions and bounce rates in terms of qualifying audiences or marketing channels. If there is an audience segment with low conversions and an extremely high number of bounces, it could be a signal that this is not a valuable or relevant customer segment.
Similarly, you may notice that certain traffic sources have higher or lower bounce rates than others, even when arriving on the same page. For example, people coming to your site from an email newsletter may bounce more often than traffic from a social media post. This helps you understand what marketing channels are performing and how to better deliver an omnichannel strategy.
To understand how to reduce your bounce rate, you first need to understand the 4 common reasons why visitors bounce in the first place.
The first thing that will cause a visitor to bounce is a poor user experience. In the first few seconds when a user arrives, they will decide whether or not to stick around. Small flaws in the user experience are just asking the user to click the back button or close the tab.
Your user experience includes the colors in your site design, layout, the fonts you choose, how easy it is to navigate, how many ads are on the page, how content is presented, etc. — anything on the page that affects the user’s experience while browsing your site.
It can sometimes be hard to detect poor user experience issues. You are close to your business and its website; you may have even designed it yourself. This means that you are too close to see issues that may be glaring for visitors.
What’s the solution? Ask your site visitors what they think. What can you do better to deliver the best possible website experience?
People often visit a website to learn more. The majority of your traffic is there to find an answer or get some more information about you, your products or another related topic. If the content isn’t there to supply that answer, or it is too hard to find on the page, people aren’t going to stick around.
This is why marketers spend so much time agonizing over keywords and content creation. You want to use keywords that audiences are actually searching (in other words, what they care about) and develop content around those subjects that help answer common questions. You can use PPCexpo Keyword Planner to find most relevant keyword according to your intent and niche.
Think critically about why people are coming to each page on your website. Does the content clearly, concisely and completely answer the question(s) that audiences have?
When bounce rates are exceedingly high, even nearing 100%, then it could be a technical problem on the page. Perhaps, it is a plugin that isn’t working or some coding that is misfiring. Whatever the case may be, users can’t access the content they want, so they are bouncing. Wouldn’t you?
This is why it is crucial that you monitor bounce rates on an individual page level. Otherwise, these technical malfunctions may go unnoticed. By routinely checking for giant spikes in bounce rates, you can detect page errors before they shatter your website experience.
In the same realm as technical errors, slow loading times will also quickly deter visitors and cause them to bounce from the page. People expect websites and pages to load instantly. Any page that takes more than one or two seconds will experience a substantially higher bounce rate. Yes, that’s all it takes!
What causes a page to load slowly? There may be several reasons. Typically, it is because there is too much stuff on the page. Remember, every element on the page needs to load, from the page layout, to the text, images, animations and videos, JavaScript elements and more. Reducing congestion on the page may speed up your load times and even create a better user experience.
As mentioned, bounce rates are crucial when looking at landing pages for PPC ads. You’ve spent money to get ad traffic to your site, now you need your landing page to do its job and engage these new users.
That said, there are some important strategies when assessing PPC bounce rates that need to be addressed.
If you really want to dissect good and bad bounce rates in your PPC pages, segmentation is the key. This is no different when you are evaluating Search and Display campaigns. You segment by metrics, dimensions, ad groups, etc. You should similarly segment your bounce rate data by campaign!
In the above data table, you can see that the overall bounce rate for the three PPC campaigns is 55%. By segmenting this data by each campaign type, you start to see a full picture of how this overall bounce rate is created. Search campaigns, for instance, have a fairly low bounce rate at 30%. On the other hand, other campaigns have significantly higher rates.
This is actually a trend that a lot of marketers experience. Audiences coming from Search ads are looking for a specific answer to their search query. Display campaigns, on the other hand, bring in a lot of traffic from people that are still exploring options, which tends to lead to higher bounces and lower conversions.
Your PPC campaigns perform differently depending on the device type of the user. This also translates to bounce rates. The way people interact with your site and its pages will change depending on whether they are using a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
One of the big differences you’ll notice when comparing bounce rates and device types is that mobile traffic is more likely to bounce. This is because mobile users browse in quick spurts. They are more particular about the websites they browse during these bite-sized chunks of activity. Desktop users, on the other hand, are more dedicated to casually browsing and will take their time on a website.
That said, don’t disregard high mobile bounce rates as normal device type behavior. Slow speeds, bad navigation and other issues browsing your site from a mobile device may be contributing to these high rates.
Let’s say you looked at the Remarketing campaign type data from before and decided to go deeper into the numbers and segment by device type.
While all device types have relatively high bounce rates, the numbers are definitely higher on mobile and tablet devices. This is something you want to look into further and see if there are any changes you can make to get those numbers down and produce a better landing page experience!
So far, the bounce rate figures have been segmented by campaign type. You can drill down further and look at specific campaigns within each category. This may add more clues as to where these bounce rates are starting from.
This is the same idea as not taking your total site bounce rate at face value. While a campaign type may have a high rate, it could be the result of just one or two individual campaigns. By digging deeper, you may discover that the ads or keywords in this campaign are not closely enough related to the resulting landing pages.
Fixing these miscues in your campaigns will not only reduce your bounce rates, but also raise the performance of your PPC account and even create stronger Quality Scores from Google.
These are great segmentation options when comparing PPC campaign data to your website traffic. Google Analytics offers its own ways to segment website traffic and narrow down bounce rates by specific variables. This is crucial because your site-wide bounce rate is limited in terms of insight.
Google Analytics tracks a lot of different demographics of your site visitors. This is great because you can really get into the various audience segments and better understand your site traffic. The age range of your visitors is one of these demographics.
To see your bounce rate by age rage, look under “Audience” on the left hand side. Then, find “Age” under the “Demographics” category.
Now, you can quickly see how age ranges impact your bounce rates. If you’re targeting very young or old audiences, you may see some higher than normal bounce rates because these audiences have different expectations. In some cases, you may want to develop pages specifically for different age groups.
Under the same “Audiences” → “Demographics” categories in the left-side menu, you’ll find “Gender” underneath the “Age” option.
Similar to the age demographic, this option will allow you to see if your pages are better at engaging a certain gender, whether male or female. For businesses that cater to a specific gender, a high bounce rate for the opposing sex may not be an issue. However, if you are trying to attract both genders and one is bouncing more often, your branding may be giving the appearance that you’re a male-oriented or a female-oriented company.
Google Ads categorizes users with similar interests as “affinity audiences.” These categories include groups like “Shoppers/Value Shoppers,” “Technology/Technophiles,” “Food & Dining/Frequently Dines Out…” and many others.
You can find “Affinity Categories” from the same left-side menu. Under the “Demographics” category is “Interests,” where you will find the check-box for “Affinity Categories.”
Depending on the scope of your business, there may be affinity audiences that appeal to you and your products/services. You want to be sure that your bounce rates aren’t high with these audiences because that would mean that you are missing the mark with your intended targets!
You also want to look at the affinity audiences with the highest bounce rates. In most cases, these will be audiences that just don’t relate to your business. However, it may be a sign that your marketing efforts are reaching too many irrelevant audiences. This would require further investigation.
Below the “Affinity Categories” option is “In-Market Segments.” In-market is a way of saying someone is actively looking to purchase a particular item. This is often reflected in search behaviors. If you are frequently looking at lawn mower types and comparing prices between different models, you would be ‘in-market’ for a lawn mower.
This is a very crucial segment for marketers and advertisers that are invested in driving conversions. In-market audiences are on the brink of converting!
When you segment by in-market audiences, you see audience profiles that are similar to the affinity categories. Then, you can look at bounce rates and see who is engaged and interacting. If there are audiences that aren’t staying on the page, think about how you can refine your targeting.
Back to the “Audience” dropdown, just below “Interests” is “Geo.” Here you will find the option to segment your traffic (and bounce rate data) by country. This is extremely useful if you are launching global campaigns and you want to compare audiences from one country to the next. This can help you optimize your strategies by location.
Another useful segmentation method is the “New vs. Returning” option under “Behaviors.” This is the “Audiences” category under “Geo.”
New and returning visitors have a tendency to act differently. If bounce rates are very low for new users, it can be very telling as to the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategies. You may not even mind if returning visitors have a high bounce rate, as long as new users are engaging and exploring your site.
By looking at new vs. returning visitors, you get a better sense of how these two segments interact with your site and its content.
In the “Technology” tab from the “Audiences” menu category, you can choose to segment your traffic report by browser and operating system types. This shows how each browser/OS (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Android, and others) affects traffic and bounces.
This is a good option to check every so often. If there is a browser with a significantly higher bounce rate, it may be a clue that your website isn’t functioning properly for this browser view. You may need to reconfigure some options so that these users enjoy the same frictionless experience as other browser types.
That said, this report can be misleading if you’re not careful. For one, some browsers and operating systems are not very popular. A high bounce rate for one browser type isn’t cause for alarm if only 5 people are using it to connect to your site.
It’s also important to look at different versions of each OS/browser. For instance, bounce rates may change dramatically between Internet Explorer Version 8.0, 9.0 and 10.0. Some outdated versions are still widely used. You may want to fix errors that these users are experiencing if they represent a sizable portion of your audience.
In the previous section, the importance of segmenting by device type was discussed. You can find Google Analytics’ analysis of device types and bounce rates by checking “Devices” under the “Mobile” category.
Again, you can use this view to see how different device types impact bounce rates. It can be a great indicator of a lackluster mobile experience.
Beneath the “Audiences” main category, you’ll see “Acquisition.” By clicking into this dropdown, you’ll see “All Traffic,” then “Source/Medium.”
This report shows you how traffic is split across different incoming sources, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Bing and any other sources, mediums or channels you may be using.
There is a lot that you can derive from this report. Here is a quick rundown:
Beneath the “Acquisition” category is “Site Content.” It is in this group that you will find the “Landing Pages” option. Checking this box will segment your site traffic report for each landing page on your site.
These pages are crucial to your marketing success, particularly if you’ve invested in PPC ads. This report will quickly allow you to identify the least and most engaging landing pages. These two groups will be great learning lessons. You’ll be able to know what’s working on some pages, what isn’t working on others and how to use both types of insights to develop overall better experiences.
This process of segmenting data and analyzing it for insights creates a categorized overview and background as to how your core PPC metrics perform. This is instrumental in identifying the areas that need the most attention.
By finding these areas of concern, you can optimize your campaigns and deliver the right ads to the right audiences. Then, bring those audiences to the right page that encourages them to engage and convert. This will create a stronger customer experience and ultimately boost your bottom line.
That said, this level of data-driven reporting is intimidating and difficult. Yet, it is so crucial to the continued success of your campaigns. PPCexpo Reporting Tool delivers optimized interactive PDF reports that give you deeper insights about your PPC campaigns, website traffic and, of course, bounce rates.
The interactivity of these PDF reports makes them exceptionally easy to use. With intuitive charting options, you can make huge strides in overcoming the usual challenges you face when trying to analyze PPC data and reduce bounce rates.
In the above screenshot, you can see how thorough PPCexpo’s Reporting tool, even when looking at just a single metric like bounce rate you can have 360 degree view of this with different dimensions. With a more complete look at how PPC metrics influence bounce rate and vice versa, you can more efficiently find those optimization opportunities and problematic areas that require more attention.
To close this guide on what is bounce rate in Google Analytics, here is a checklist of common strategies that you can use to reduce your bounce rate. You should run through this list and test the impact of each option on your bounce rates.
Don’t just assume that a page with a high bounce rate is the result of poor content. It may be that the page isn’t loading fast enough. You need to pay close attention to page speeds because 47% of Internet users expect that a page loads in less than two seconds. When this expectation is not met, they will leave, no matter how good the content is. This will have a dramatic impact on your bounce rate.
Start by identifying the slowest pages and then removing cumbersome elements in these areas to speed them up.
People don’t want to work too hard when they arrive at a website. If the content on the page is overwhelming or there is just too much stuff to get through, many visitors will not stick around. Remember, people are coming to have a question answered. If it is too hard to find that answer, they’ll just leave.
To remedy this, try and format content so that it isn’t intimidating. Small paragraphs, bullets, summaries, pictures and many other tactics will help make content more accessible.
A lot of websites allow advertisers to publish ads on their sites in return for revenue. Similarly, businesses promote their own events, content, products, etc. on their pages. All of these promotions and ads can quickly become too much to visitors. Be very careful with how many promotions and ads you’re including on each page.
Look at pages with high bounce rates and visit them yourself. Are there a lot of ads and promotions? If yes, then reduce the number of these messages and see if rates improve.
High bounce rates are not always a bad thing, especially if time on site is high. If people are spending time on your site and consuming your content, it is still a win. They just didn’t navigate elsewhere, which means they are counted as a bounce. Thus, it is really crucial that you look at bounce rate and time on site together.
If you come across pages with high bounce rates and low time on site, then you know that these are areas that need attention. This means people are not engaging with the content for long and they are quickly leaving.
Many pages on your website are designed to get a customer to perform a certain action. This action needs to be clear to each visitor. And, you should only have one call-to-action on each page. Multiple options can be too much; users won’t be able to make up their mind! Make the decision easy and just leave one option.
Tip: Think about user intent and how your pages can help visitors accomplish their goal, then include a clear, relevant call to action that helps them get the job done.
Your site needs to flow and that flow is created through links. Think about how your pages are connected to each other. Does it make sense? Does each blog connect to other, relevant posts discussing the same subject? When the linking structure is designed logically, visitors are more likely to move about your site and go from one page to the next.
There is no fast fix for linking structure. You need to think about what makes the most sense to audiences and then test how different links work on various pages.
The recipe to a successful product page isn’t always easy to decipher. In what order do you arrange the product features? What images do you select? What language do you use to describe the product? The list goes on. When people land on these pages, you really hope that they do their job and encourage these individuals to purchase.
Optimizing product pages is a continuous process. You should always be revisiting these pages and thinking of ways to improve the content and make the items appear more appealing. Also, look for ways to reduce friction in the checkout process.
There are a thousand and one reasons to optimize for mobile. The biggest one is simple: mobile users are extremely active and represent a major portion of your traffic. If you aren’t prepared to optimize your site and its content and pages for mobile users, then you’re sending a signal to these users that you aren’t interested in their business.
Browse your site from a mobile device and look for elements that disrupt the experience.
You won’t always know the best way to edit a page in order to reduce bounce rates. And, testing each change one at a time is tedious and ineffective. The better option is multivariate testing. You can test multiple versions of the same page and compare the results of each one. This allows you to quickly get to the bottom of what changes really produce results! When your bounce rates are high, A/B testing will help you find ways to reduce them.
What is a bounce rate in Google Analytics? The bounce rate is a crucial metric that is used to evaluate the performance of your website and its pages. It also impacts the success of your PPC campaigns.
There are several ways to segment, analyze, and improve bounce rates. It can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be! PPCexpo Reporting tool will work alongside your Google Analytics reports giving a deep, detailed look at your bounce rate data.
You’ll be more efficient when it comes to identifying bounce rate issues and finding ways to fix those troublesome areas.
Save time, reduce bounce, and stop stressing about intimidating data-rich analysis!
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