What is Bounce Rate?
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The term “bounce rate” may be thrown at you sometimes when someone is discussing how successful advertising or a promotion might be. But, What is Bounce Rate? I never knew exactly what it was, but I figured I didn’t want anyone “bouncing” off our blog. So the lower % the better.
Bouncing off your Blog
What does Bounce Rate actually mean? Well the question was asked, and answered on the Bloggeries Forum. Jay of Online Opportunity handled the question very well.
A bounce is when a visitor lands on one page of your site, and doesn’t visit another page in your site.
They could, potentially, look at that one page for a very long time, and still be considered a bounce.
Bounce rates basically measure how interesting other pages of your site are to your visitors. Depending on what your site is, you may or may not be worried about bounce rates.
A site that has product reviews, for example, might have a high bounce rate if the single page that someone lands on answers all their questions about the product so they don’t need to go anywhere else on the site.
So What Does Bounce Rate Matter?
Well for some things it doesn’t. I would assume visitors searching for your site via google etc, may bounce more, after they find the answer or query they are searching for.
Bounce rate may also effect which advertising opportunities you wish to pursue. If you are getting a lot of hits from a certain advertising opportunity, but they are leaving your page without clicking other pages of your site, that may be of less valuable to you.
It may also influence which social media sites you want to promote your content on. When we were dugg our bounce rate was at 95%+, which meant that many of the users visited our digg page then left, probably never to return again.
Finding your Bounce Rate
The only tracking system that I know that calculates bounce rate is Google Analytics. Analytics is easy to set-up on your blog, it only needs a simple code. After the code is added you can explore tons of stats that include bounce rate.
Do you pay attention to your bounce rate? If so, what is it? Make sure to share it with us and the Bloggeries Forum.
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18 Comments on this post
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Allan Cheng said:
Mine is 68% not bad for a music site I would say as some will leave once they download an mp3 on my site.
February 4th, 2008 at 1:11 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
thats not bad, about what ours is 🙂
I think it is 64%
February 4th, 2008 at 1:34 pm -
Bloggeries said:
I think a lot of it also depends on the TYPES of traffic you’re getting. Are you pulling in search engine traffic for obscure terms simply because you can, are you getting tones of social media come and go? Or are you getting quality organic searches on your topic or click through’s from relevant blogs / sites.
Many things go into a bounce rate; I think it’s a happy medium; I’ve gotten mine down to ~58% now but with some recent social media stuff it will probably rise again.
February 4th, 2008 at 1:39 pm -
Ninja Success said:
That is a great explanation of bounce rate! Thanks!
February 4th, 2008 at 10:32 pm -
Sampath said:
I thinks it depends on your marketing medium and the type of traffic as Bloggeries said. If your site has content which attracts visitors, then it will make a difference in your bounce rate.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:28 am -
Dennis Edell said:
Very cool post, I’ll have to hook up Google. I also ty for the new forum (new to me that is).
For any newbies reading this, don’t confuse it with “email bounce rate” 🙂
(Hey guys, I wonder the CTR on the latest entrecard, interesting marketing.)
February 5th, 2008 at 6:57 am -
Mark said:
Nicely done, Matthew. I never really understood bounce rate until now. Thanks for educating me. 🙂
February 6th, 2008 at 4:16 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
I didn’t know much or really care, but it is definitely a handy stat to have and know 🙂
February 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pm -
Jylan Wynne said:
I think it takes a lot of work to get your bounce rate down, and for some people it just won’t happen.
BTW, Google is not the only one offering a bounce rate statistic. Clicky (getclicky.com/) also offers that feature in their paid (although very cheap) service.
February 9th, 2008 at 6:43 pm -
simon said:
excellent article indeed…. this clarifies the whole picture
February 11th, 2008 at 10:28 pm -
Fiona Bloom said:
Mine is between 20-25% bounce which initially concerned me but after reading your breakdown- I feel better about now!
May 16th, 2009 at 5:01 pm -
Emrah said:
Hi
Usually I saw 20-30% bounce rate on the sites I manage. but recently I have 0.45% bounce rate on NewYearsNYC.com
I believe it’s because of the pictures on the right side. What do you guys think?December 4th, 2009 at 11:52 am -
Talking Ava said:
Interesting, you know what, I should check it out soon. I have yet to see what my site’s bounce rating is at.
March 24th, 2010 at 12:07 am -
Talking Ava said:
A great and clear post! This makes me want to badly find out what my site’s bounce rate is at.
April 8th, 2010 at 8:09 pm -
Hardy Leung said:
I released a tag cloud creator Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) and I use both Clicky and Google Analytics.
Clicky told me I have a bounce rate of 16%. Google Analytics’ number is 0.16% (!). 16% is good, but 0.16%? Is this a bug? All the other numbers (page view, average time on site, etc) are reasonable and somewhat consistent between the two.
April 19th, 2010 at 3:16 pm -
Donna L. Ward said:
Thanks so much for the great and clear post – My bounce rate – google analytics – is usually around 45-49% – I thought that was really bad – but, guess not quite as bad as I thought. I still want to work on getting it better and have made a few changes and will test that out to see if it helps.
Coach Donna
January 16th, 2011 at 10:30 am
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