What is website bounce rate and why is it important?
The bounce rate is a fairly widely (mis)understood indicator that many people use to rate the performance of a website, saying that if the bounce rate is high, the website is bad. In this article we explain why this is not true in many cases.
The bounce rate is an indicator used in Google Analytics 3 (also known as Universal Analytics) and indicates the percentage of website visitors who left the page without interaction, which is calculated like this:
Bounce rate: number of bounces / number of sessions
Many people think this definition means that the bounce rate measures the percentage of website visitors who left the landing page without viewing further pages. This is not entirely correct, since the number of bounces does not correspond to the number of visits to a single sub-page, but to the number of visits that performed only one engagement interaction (engagement hit). There are a total of 6 types of interaction: page visit, event, add to cart, purchase, social media share or user-defined action. The first 5 of these are engagement interactions. Attention: scrolling down on the landing page is not considered an interaction, so someone can be measured as a bounce even if they have scrolled down to the bottom of our landing page!
Another thing that is very important to know about the bounce rate calculation is that not every website visit counts as a new session (a session can last a maximum of 30 minutes). If the computer wakes up from sleep mode and we look at the web page that has already been opened, Google Analytics does not measure this as a new session, so the measured number of sessions is always less than in reality. For this reason, the bounce rates of individual websites are always distorted compared to reality.
The third thing worth knowing is that the time spent on the website by a “bouncing” user is always zero seconds, since Google Analytics measures the time elapsed between interactions and the bouncing user had only one interaction (arriving on the website).
Can we tell the quality of the website based on the bounce rate?
Company X: The conversion rate of my website is 40%.
Company Y: And the conversion rate of my website is 80%.
Can we tell which company’s website performs better from this? No!
As with many other indicators, it is also true for the bounce rate that it is not enough to look at the numbers only, but also take into account the context as well. For example, in the situation above, we do not know which subpage they are talking about. Main page? Subpage? A blog post? The landing page? Or the average of the entire website? Is it a B2B website or a B2C website, a lead generation website or a webshop? Furthermore, we don’t know whether the visitors come from paid ads or from organic results. These and many other factors influence how the bounce rate develops.
When comparing two websites, a higher bounce rate does not automatically mean that the website is worse. For example, if Company X’s website is just a navigation page with no meaningful content, visitors are forced to click through somewhere to determine if they are on the right page. On the other hand, if company Y’s page contains a blog article, users can read the article before leaving the page and still be registered as bouncing users. In this case, company X’s website was completely useless for the user, while company Y’s website provided value, but we cannot determine this by examining the bounce rate alone.
The bounce rate can also be distorted by the fact that a session lasts a maximum of 30 minutes. If the user spends more than 30 minutes on a website without any interaction (just reading the content of the page), then he will be considered a bouncing user, despite the fact that he is committed to the article, that is, he has read it all the way through. Another possibility is that the visitor determined that the content of the website was interesting to them, but at that moment did not have enough time to look through it, so they saved it to her bookmarks and then left the page. These examples result in higher bounce rates than reality, but there are also cases that show lower than reality. This could be, for example, an implementation error of the basic Google Analytics tracking code, e.g. the code is mentioned twice on the page or the use of a popup window on the landing page, which results in a zero percentage of bounce rate (since the visitor has to close the popup window, so the system no longer considers them a bouncer).
What is the average bounce rate?
As we presented earlier, the “normal” level of the bounce rate depends on several things. It is very difficult to say what can be called good on a website, which is why the bounce rate in itself is a rather wrong indicator of the quality of the website.
In general, we can say that the bounce rate of navigation pages is around 0-10%, while that of landing pages without interaction is around 100%. The conversion rate of many pages (including blog pages for example) is 80%. A good landing page has about a 50% bounce rate. However, they only give a very weak reference, since they can vary by country, industry or, for example, according to the targeted age group of the content.
This graph shows the bounce rate of the top landing pages of hundreds of websites:
Let’s refine the website measurements!
Above, we have listed many scenarios where Google Analytics 3 sees the visitor as a bounced user, even though they have engaged with the content. However, this can also be helped at the measurement level, you just need to understand how Google Analytics measures.
Due to the nature of the measurement, Google Analytics can only measure time spent on the page (and thus engagement) between two engagement interactions (engagement hits). If there is no second interaction from which the indicators can be calculated, it will be registered as a bounced user, which increases the bounce rate and the time spent on the page will be zero. To avoid this, we simply need to achieve a second interaction, from which Google Analytics can calculate the time spent on the page and other indicators. The two easiest ways to do this are to measure button clicks on the page (e.g. submitting a form that does not redirect to a thank you page), or to measure scrolling down the page. If we set it as an interaction type event, then we will get a more accurate picture of what actions users perform on our website, and the high bounce rate due to the nature of the measurement will decrease.
What should I do if I think my website’s bounce rate is too high?
If we have examined the bounce rate of our website in context and still feel that it is higher than what would be ideal, we can try to improve our website. The first and perhaps the most important criterion to check is how fast our website loads and whether it is mobile-friendly. Nowadays no one is willing to wait more than 2 seconds for a website to load, and will immediately leave the page if it does not display properly on mobile. Furthermore, it is worth checking whether the page contains content that the user coming to the page expects, or whether they had been misled in some way, e.g. with a misleading advertisement. In the second case, it is expected that they will leave the page after a few seconds. If your website loads quickly enough, the content on it is adequate and yet the visitors leave the page without interaction, then it may be worthwhile to place CTA (call to action) elements on the page that encourage the user to interact in some way (e.g. Sign up for free consultation!).
In Google Analytics 4, the bounce rate metric was introdused late, in July 2022 and includes the non-engaged sessions, which is a lot more sophisticated way to identify bounced website visitors than in GA3.
An engaged session in Google Analytics 4 is any session that lasted at least 10 seconds OR one or more conversion events occurred during it OR 2 or more page views occurred.
Let’s compare the bounce rate (GA3) of a specific website with the “engaged sessions” data of GA4 of the same website due to the difference in approach!
Summary
Many people only know the bounce rate superficially and therefore attach more importance to it than it should when evaluating the performance of their website. Do not forget to always evaluate the bounce rate only in context and together with other metrics to avoid wrong conclusions! Consider it significant that the bounce rate as an indicator was removed from the GA4 measurements by Google, and can only be found in the soon-to-be-defunct Universal Analytics.
Measure as many events as possible on your website so that you have as much information as possible about what interactions are performed on your website!
If you need professional support for your digital marketing activities, do not hesitate to contact us!
Sources:
- http://help.analyticsedge.com/googleanalytics/misunderstood-metrics-bounce-rate/
- http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2012/06/google-analytics-bounce-rate-demystified.html
- http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-time-calculations/
- http://www.digishuffle.com/blogs/bounce-rate-exit-rate/