Evaluating Your Website's Bounce Rate

It's All About Bounce Rate... or is It?

Understanding bounce rate is an important aspect of analyzing your overall statistics, especially when it comes to determining the effectiveness of an individual page. The bounce rate measures the number of visitors to a website that leave before a specified amount of time has elapsed (this time period varies among analytics tools, but is typically 30 minutes). This means that if a user accesses your site and leaves it within 30 minutes or leaves their browser idle for that time, they will be registered as a bounce. The bounce rate for an individual page of a website is determined by the number of users that access a page and leave the site without clicking to another page within the specified time period.

So how high is too high? Avinash Kaushik, one of Google's analytics experts, has blogged about measuring the effectiveness of your web pages and writes:

"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 based on my experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for."

On the whole, I agree with Kaushik. After all, he knows much, much more about web analytics than I ever will. But I would add one consideration: Your evaluation of your bounce rate should take into account your specific goals for your website, as well as the overall number of pages that make up your site. Our site makes a good example of this idea. Because we write so many newsletter articles and blog posts, we get lots of organic search traffic, much of which does not turn in to actual leads for us. This is because our site is very information-rich and covers topics that are sometimes only loosely related to what we actually do, which benefits many more people than are interested in working with us. Consequently, these visitors will read one of our articles, get the information they were looking for, and then leave. It's not the same kind of bounce as a user that leaves immediately because they didn't find what they were looking for, but it's a bounce just the same.

Stay on Point

At the beginning of January, the overall bounce rate for our site was around 72%, very high by anyone's standards. Of course, we had 1,738 pages viewed on our site last month alone, many of which were topical articles that likely had fairly high bounce rates individually. Again, this is because our organic search traffic is very strong, which brings all kinds of viewers to our site, the minority of which fit our positioning. However, I wasn't convinced that our bounce rate couldn't be reduced. In reviewing our top content, I noticed two particular blog posts that were registering extremely high bounce rates, even over 95%. One was a review I wrote comparing Picasa to Flickr way back in 2006. The other was a blog post written by Bettina Johnson, our Resourcer, who compared WALL-E to Apple computers. Both posts were receiving tons of organic search traffic, but because neither had anything to do with our company's core discipline, web development, those viewers who read the articles were not sticking around. In other words, these posts were unnecessarily skewing our numbers. Though I'm pretty comfortable with having a higher (by Kaushik's standards) bounce rate, I decided to remove these pages from our site to see if our bounce rate would begin to drop. Less than two weeks later, our bounce rate has dropped to 69%. I'm betting that we can get down to 50% by making more minor tweaks like this. Even though we create a lot of content that is peripheral to our core discipline, instances like this show that it pays to stay on point most of the time.

So far, I've been talking about bounce rate in the context of your entire site, which is ultimately just an average of all the individual bounce rates of all your individual pages. If you are paying attention to your Top Content reports and identifying which pages are most important on your site, it is their individual bounce rate that matters more than your overall site bounce rate. From that perspective, I would certainly be looking for rates under 40%.