CWS Web Marketing Blog

Driving targeted traffic to your web site is one of the most important goals of web marketing. But what if you are getting lots of relevant traffic and not seeing much business from it? One place to look is the Bounce Rate.

Here is Google’s own definition of Bounce Rate: “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”

In other words, if you are driving targeted traffic to your web site and you have a high bounce rate, the problem is not with your visitors but with your site.

Your overall Bounce Rate is right there on the dashboard when you first log in to Google Analytics, but it’s more useful when viewed on other reports, such as All Traffic Sources, Keyword, or Content.

Perhaps you’ve purchased a link on another site and want to get a better idea of the quality of traffic from that site. Take a quick look at the bounce rate and compare it to the rate for other traffic sources on your site.

You can also look at the bounce rate for various keyword phrases to see if your content is engaging searchers who are using terms that are relevant to your products and services. Looking at the bounce rate for particular pages on your web site can also give you helpful feedback on how well your content is working.

Look at the Top Landing Pages report and pick a page with a relatively high Bounce Rate. (Landing pages are the pages on which visitors entered your site.) Click on the name of that page (the underlined link in the left column). On the next screen you can use the Analyze pull-down menu to select Entrance Keywords. From here you can see the Bounce Rates for all the keyword phrases used by searchers who landed on that page. Cool! You get a clear snapshot of the nature of your search engine traffic and how well your content is holding those visitors’ interest.

If you are running an Adwords campaign, the Bounce Rate is a great indicator of the health of your Ad Groups. You certainly don’t want to be paying for clicks when the visitors hop off your site the second they land. The Bounce Rate won’t tell you what is wrong, only that something is. If you’re seeing a high Bounce Rate for a certain Ad Group, look at the rates for individual keywords in that Ad Group. Is there one phrase with a very high Bounce Rate? If so, it could be that you are buying a keyword phrase that is not well targeted, or it could be that the landing page for that ad is not relevant or compelling enough to engage your visitors.

As with all metrics, you should be careful to consider Bounce Rates in context. For example, if you have an Adwords campaign that drives visitors to a landing page for a product or service they can buy on that page through a 3rd party service (meaning the visitor will leave your site to make the purchase), then a 1-page visit isn’t such a bad thing. Another place where a high Bounce Rate may not be bad is for a blog where the full text of all the posts is on the home page. Visitors may spend a lot of time with that page, but it still shows a high bounce rate.

Also keep in mind that at very low levels of traffic the Bounce Rate becomes less meaningful. If 3 searchers landed on your blue widgets page after typing “blue widgets” in the search engines, and the Bounce Rate is 66%, well it could just be that you’ve run into some Nutty Searchers. “Oh, I didn’t mean to type blue widgets; I meant to type red widgets” or “Just as I hit “Search” the dog ran off with the remote and I had to give chase.” Nutty Searchers happen.

It’s never very accurate to generalize about “good” and “bad” rates in web marketing (better to look at your own trends over time), but that said, I tend to think of bounce rates in the 30-40% range as “OK.” Lower bounce rates than that are quite good – the higher the rate, the more likely there is a problem.