Bounce Rate, A metric which cant be ignored!

July 14, 2007 by Anil
Filed under: Web Analytics 

I read a interesting post about Bounce authored by Anil Batra, which also figured in the WAAssociation article.Here’s the post, A must readWeb Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising: Bounce Rate Demystified

Here’s a overview of the articles.

1. What is bounce rate?
2. What is the industry standard for bounce rate?
3. What causes high or low bounce rates?

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site (or a page) and then leave immediately. Think of a ball (visitor) that is thrown (visits) towards a table (site). It hits the table and bounces back without rolling (visiting any other pages).

Generally, “leave immediately” in the above definition means without going to any other page. However it could also be expressed in terms of time spent on site, say users who spend 5 seconds or less on the site irrespective of the number of pages they view

Exit ratio is usually expressed as the percentage of exits from a page to the total number of visits to that page. As a side note: A lot of times exit ratio expressed as % of visits can be misleading. In most cases, page views are actually more appropriate than visits for this ratio. Why page views and not visits? If I view the same page twice during the same visit, and after one of those page views I exit, shouldn’t my exit ratio be 50% rather than 100%? The first view of this page was compelling enough for me to further engage. A 100% exit ratio would indicate a problem that may not be there.

Bounce rate is confused with Single Page Visit Ratio: Single page visit ratio is calculated as a percentage of single page visits over total visits to a page.

What is the industry standard for bounce rate?
There are several factors that determine the actual bounce rate of any page.

Here are some of the numbers that were listed by Steve Jackson based on his experience with various sites.

Source: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/message/6116

* Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce.
* Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I’ve seen
bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.
* Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.
* Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.
* Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.
* Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%.

What are the factors that affect the bounce rate?

Below are some of the factors that determine the bounce rates. You can use this as a checklist to diagnose a high bounce rate issue.

1. Source of your traffic.
2. Search engine ranking of the page
3. Type of Audience
4. Landing Page Design
5. Ad and Landing Page Messages
6. Emails and Newsletters
7. Load time of your page(s)
8. Links to external sites
9. Purpose of the page
10. Other factors

Comments, suggestions and feedback welcome :)

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