Web Analytics Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a web analytics metric that measures visitors’ quality to a site. Web (landing) pages’ high bounce rates often cause websites to have low conversion rates.

Definition of Bounce Rate

Wikipedia’s definition and formula of bounce rate:

Bounce Rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits

Google defines search engine traffic’s bounce rate as:

A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run.

Note that bounce rate is different to exit rate.

Analyze Bounce Rate, Reduce Bounce Rate

Avinash Kaushik and Jakob Nielson recommend measuring and analyzing your website’s bounce rate by segmentation.

Avinash Kaushik reckons you should:

  • Measure bounce rate of your website
  • Measure bounce rate of your different traffic sources
  • Measure bounce rate of your search keywords
  • Measure bounce rate of your PPC traffic (i.e. Google AdWords, Microsoft Bing AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns)
  • Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages

Jakob Nielson believes you must analyze bounce rates separately for four sources of visitors:

  • Low-value referrers
  • Direct links from other websites
  • Search engine traffic
  • Loyal users

Dosh Dosh’s Maki believes you must measure bounce rate against your overall web site goals, improve your site’s bounce rate, and get more page views. To increase the ratio of page viewed per visit, include additional links:

  • Links to feature articles with in-depth analysis
  • Links to other news articles on the same topic
  • Links to a dedicated reference page dealing with only the specific topic
  • Links to a comment section/forum to invite participation by readers
  • Links to a Back story or general background information
  • Links to a multi-media presentation (audio/video)

Bounce Rate as a Search Engine Ranking Factor

If search engine traffic is important to your website, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge believes bounce rate is one of the factors in Google’s search algorithm. SEO Black Hat also has had this fact confirmed.

Bounce Rate Reports on Free Web Analytics

Measure and analyze bounce rate through one of the free web analytics:

Comments

2 Responses to “Web Analytics Bounce Rate”

  1. Kent on January 5th, 2010 9:38 am

    it’s a good bounce rate guide

  2. Rhoda on October 29th, 2010 6:27 pm

    Actually on the Wikipedia site there seems to be confusion about how to calculate the bounce rate.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate

    The first definition has SPV (single page visits/ TOTAL visits, the second SPV / ENTRY visits.

    Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits

    Where
    Rb = Bounce rate
    Tv = Total number of visits viewing one page only
    Te = Total entries to page

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