Is a High Bounce Rate Killing Your Profits?
What is Bounce Rate and How Can We Improve on it?
Today I’m going to cover the basics for the term bounce rate… it will be a quick overview of what it means, how it’s figured, and what you can do to change it.
The term bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that land on your website then leave before clicking on a second page from inside your site. Your bounce rate can be too high for many reasons that you can’t control:
- Your visitor found what they were looking for, then moved on
- Your visitor didn’t find what they were looking for, then moved on
- Your visitor typed a new website address on his browser window
- The visitor clicked on one of your external links
- The visitor used their search box to find additional information elsewhere
- The visitor hit the back button on his browser
We can’t be certain why a person would leave your site, but what we do know is if they leave your site before clicking a second page, it will be counted as a bounce, causing your percentage to increase. The formula for understanding the percentage rate for your site would be:
To give you an example… if in any given month, your site receives 10,000 visits, and out of those 10,000 visits, 6000 exited after visiting the first page they landed on, your bounce rate would be 6000 divided by 10,000 which gives you a bounce rate of 60%.
The lower the bounce rate, the better because it means that visitors are intrigued with your website for various reasons, and they end up visiting a second, third or more pages on your site.
Having analytics to discover that your bounce rate is too high can be a very important tool in your SEO arsenal. Knowing this information will give you the opportunity to be creative and brainstorm for new and fresh ideas to improve on your site, hopefully to keep your visitors from exiting so quickly.
One thing to consider is that you shouldn’t really compare your bounce rate to that of other websites. The reason for this is that there are simply too many variables affecting the bounce rate, and what applies to one website, even if it’s a direct competitor, may not apply to your website.
If you don’t already have analytics to determine the visitor exit rate for your site, you can get Google Analytics which will automatically track the numbers for you.
Whether you already have Google Analytics or you want to set it up to monitor your site’s traffic, make sure you filter out your own IP address to keep your readings accurate (you can add multiple IP addresses if you visit your site from other locations too). If you visit your own site 20 times a day, the Google Analytics will read that and your information will not be accurate.
The best way to find your computer or routers IP address would be to visit this link: Black List Alert which will automatically display your IP address.
Open another window or tab, then go to your Google Analytics and click on the Edit link to the right of your website address, scroll down the page to “Filters Applied to Profile”, then in the right hand corner of that box, click on “+ Add Filter”.
In the “Enter Filter Information”, add a name for the filter (mine says ‘WeblogTips Home IP Address’ because I filter more than one), then click on the drop down menu in the middle that says “Traffic from the Domains”, and choose the middle one “Traffic from the IP Addresses”. Fill in the IP address that the ‘Black List Alert’ website displayed, click Save Changes, and you’re good to go!
Ways to Improve Your Bounce Rate!
Let’s see if we can determine why the exit rate for your site is too high, and why your visitors leave your site after the first page they land on. Could you have broken links? Does your website take too long to load? Is your site easy to navigate, or do you have to search around to find information? Do you have internal linking between articles on your site to keep them reading more?
Just stop for a minute and determine what it is that you are offering to the visitors, and whether your content writing is stimulating and compelling enough to satisfy your readers. If your bounce rate is too high, it’s time to reach out to others… you can have a friend or family member take a look at your site and give you feed back.
If a person has some tips for you, take it as constructive criticism and turn it into something worthwhile to improve your bounce rate. Another option is to check out other successful blogs on the Web… here is the link to the article I wrote to follow this one. Here are 10 successful blogs to help you brainstorm for ideas to improve your Web site’s bounce rate.
I’D LOVE TO HEAR YOUR OPINION… about my article on Bounce Rate! Please use the comment box down below to leave your thoughts, feedback or questions.
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Hey John
This is a great overview of the “bounce rate”. Mine is sitting at around 40%, have no idea if that is good or bad… I have nothing to compare it to. Maybe you can let me know what I should aim to be sitting at so I can keep an eye on it!
thanks for sharing this info
cheers
Nat
Hi Natalie,
I have wondered if there is a magic number myself… from my research, your number 40% is a typical number. One thing to keep in mind is that different types of sites will have different bounce rates… example, Amazon will have an incredibly low bounce rate because the typical consumer goes to Amazon for a purpose, to look for a product, and they usually don’t find it on the first page they land on. In opinion, I think your bounce rate is awesome, and from what I have learned over the years, the bounce rate is best determined after six to twelve months, and once you achieve a reasonable amount of traffic for a better average.
I hope that I have helped!
Thanks for stopping by Natalie!
John Engle
Hey John, thanks so much for getting back to me. Makes sense what you said about sites like Amazon to. I haven’t been blogging that long so will keep an eye on it over the next few months as my traffic grows and see what happens to it
I might be back for some help on keeping it low if it starts climbing with the more traffic I pull in!
cheers
Nat
Hi John,
Once again, I really appreciate your article. Bounce Rate is something I haven’t given enough thought to but you have inspired me to pay even more attention to SEO and content and the more technical aspects of blogging.
many thanks!
Buff
Hi Buff,
Bounce rate can most definitely be a good measuring tool for your website if the proper amount of time has passed to allow your site to average out with a larger crowd of visitors. My bounce rate is at 47.65 %, but my site is also only 3 weeks old, so I really can’t count on that rate for a few more months at the minimum.
Thank you for your comment… stop by anytime!
John Engle
Hi John,
thanks for sharing your insights about the bounce rate. It’s an important indicator but as you note, there are a lot of unknown variables we can’t control. So I wouldn’t become too obsessed about it.
Take care
Oliver
Hey Oliver,
True, it is an important indicator, and there are quite a bit of variables so people shouldn’t take it too seriously. On the other hand, even though there are a lot of unknown reasons for your bounce rate to be high, it can encourage you to take a hard look at your site, and ask yourself if any thing is missing that could possibly keep visitors from moving through your site more… is there any changes that you can do to improve the flow of traffic throughout your site.
Thank you for your comments!
John Engle
Thanks again for another great post John. I was really confused at first at what “bounce rate” meant. I just knew that it wasn’t good if it was high
but now I know! 
Hey Emily,
Thank you for your compliments… at one point I too was confused about the word “bounce rate”. I don’t know why it isn’t just called something more simple like “the percentage of people that visited your site, but didn’t go beyond the page they landed on”… I guess that’s a little long huh? I guess we’ll just have to stick with that crazy name for now.
Thanks for stopping by… please drop by anytime!
John Engle
I find that when i tweet my post I have a higher bounce rate than only tweeting the better posts.
Hey Mark,
It sounds like you have a noticeable pattern, so I guess it’s best to stick with what you know and only pass on to Twitter what you know will be a big hit.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
John Engle
Hi John,
Thanks for providing such detailed info on “Bounce Rate” I’ve been wondering about it for some time. I just checked my google analytics and see that I have a bounce rate of 7.4% I am guessing based on your info, that isn’t too bad?
My biggest problem is traffic, which is low, only about 700 visits per mo. Perhaps that is why my bounce rate is so low? I guess it’s time to scour your site for info on how to drive more traffic… I am sure there is equally as excellent info on that subject here!
Thanks John,
Richard
Hey Richard,
Thank you for the nice words… scour away!
So, your bounce rate is 7.4%… wow, that is low. Do you have your own IP address excluded in your Google Analytics? If not, this could play a factor in your bounce rate readings. If I didn’t mention that in my article, that’s my bad… I think I will check and see, if not I will put it in there.
If you don’t have your IP filtered out in Google Analytics, the best way to find your router (home) IP address would be to visit this link: http://www.blacklistalert.org/ which will automatically display your IP address.
Go to your Google Analytics and click on the Edit link to the right of your website address, scroll down the page to “Filters Applied to Profile”, then in the right hand corner of that box, click on “+ Add Filter”.
In the “Enter Filter Information”, add a name for the filter (anything will do), then click on the drop down menu in the middle that says “Traffic from the Domains”, and choose the middle one “Traffic from the IP Addresses”.
Fill in the IP address that the ‘BlackListAlert’ website displayed, click Save Changes, and you’re good to go!
I hope this helped!
John Engle
WOW! Thanks John once again!
I had NO idea about filtering out my own IP address. As you suspected, it was not set up properly.
I’ve made the changes and will keep an eye on my Bounce Rate…
I can only hope it doesn’t jump up into the 60 or 70 % range. lol
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain in such great detail how to set up a filter. Your steps were perfect and made it extremely simple to follow.
Thanks again John,
Richard
Hi Richard,
I was glad to help… if it weren’t for you replying with a comment, I probably wouldn’t have thought about placing the information that I wrote out for you, into my article that I wrote many moons ago.
Keep me up to speed on what your bounce rate does!
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment!
John Engle
John, my bounce rate is off the charts at 84% and rising due to Stumble Upon traffic. I have never stumbled myself. If I have such a bad site, why am I getting more and more stumble traffic? I’m baffled. Before getting discovered by SU, my bounce rate was somewhere between 50 and 60. Any advice?
Hi Paula,
Sorry for the late response… your email fell into the cracks, and I missed it until now.
StumbleUpon seems to be a different group of people… I put an article on to StumbleUpon and received 752 views in one day and boy did my bounce rate for that day skyrocket. It appears as if people are just clicking on what catches their eye, but they aren’t there actually searching for something in particular… they are just browsing.
My only advice is to keep doing what you are doing, I personally think your site looks awesome and is very interesting! I clicked through a few of your recipe pages, so I helped your bounce rate hopefully.
John Engle