Bounce Rate - What Is It?

When it comes to marketing and marketing analytics, there are many terms that you will need to learn. An important metric you will need to get familiar with is bounce rate. Bounce rate is a metric that is measured by the amount of people who have landed on your page and did not click another link, simply "bounced" out of your site completely. Bounce rate is used to determine how well people engage on a certain web page of your site. You can easily identify optimization opportunities by looking at pages with higher than normal bounce rates.

 

How Is Bounce Rate Calculated?

When you look at your Google Analytics dashboard, you are going to see many different metrics that range from where users came from to how much money they spent on your site. When you see your bounce rate, you may know that high bounce rate is usually bad and lower bounce rates usually indicate a good site. However, many do not understand exactly how bounce rate is calculated. To get your bounce rate, Google divides all single page session by all of your sessions on your site, or for lack of better words, the percentage of your visits that were one page only visits.

 

Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO?

One of the biggest concerns that many marketers have when it comes to bounce rate is "does it affect SEO". This can be kind of tricky as bounce rate is simply a metric calculated by Google Analytics, so Google's search engine algorithm never sees it, thus not affecting SEO. However, SEO is calculated on a variety of different metrics with user experience being one of the most important factors as of lately. A high bounce rate site can cause a bad user experience, so high bounce rates could inadvertently affect SEO.

 

What Causes High Bounce Rates?

If you have found a few pages that have a high bounce rate, you may be wondering what could have caused such a high bounce rate, but with a little research, you can dig into what might be causing these issues. One of the most common issues is a misleading title or meta description, sometimes referred to as "click baiting". Titling a web page to draw in users where your site has poor content or content that does not coincide with what the user wanted can cause users to click back out of your site, raising your bounce rate. Other factors include a slow site, bad page structure, and non-mobile friendly sites.

 

How To Lower Bounce Rates?

Once you have found the pages that have a high bounce rate, it is time to make the corrections to get your bounce rates lowered. Adding supplemental links, articles, and photos can all help to make the user more engaged and want to navigate your site. Having a good clean, fast site can also help as users will be more inclined to click around if they know the site is going to load fast.