What is bounce rate, and why is it important? This article explains how bounce rates work, and looks at typical bounce rates for different types of site. There are a number of factors that contribute to a high bounce rate. Learn most effective ways to reduce bounce rate of your Blog....

What is bounce rate?

The bounce rate measures the number of people who arrive at your site, then leave your site after viewing just one page (instead of going on to explore other pages on the site). Such a visit is called a bounce.
To calculate a website's bounce rate for a given period, you divide the number of bounces by the total number of site visits during the period, and multiply by 100. For example, say your site gets 1,000 visits in a 24-hour period, of which 300 are bounces. Your site's bounce rate is therefore (300 ÷ 1,000 × 100 ) = 30%.
You can also calculate bounce rate on a per-page basis. For example, if 1,000 visitors enter your site on a particular page and 300 of those visitors leave without viewing any other pages, then that page's bounce rate is 30%.

If we put the whole thing in a mathematical formula it would be:


So Finally What is Bounce Rate means to Google: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). 

Why is bounce rate important?

Now let’s see how it affects to your website. If you have a high bounce rate that means the visitors are not interested on your site as visitors are not getting proper information from your site. Hence gradually the popularity of your site will decrease.
On the other side if the bounce rate is low, your visitors are interested in your site content and thus your site gets more and more popularity.

Still have question why is bounce rate important for your blog?

• A low bounce rate indicates that the site is attracting the right kind of audience, and that visitors are exploring the site's content. 
• A high bounce rate suggests that visitors aren't finding what they're looking for when they arrive on the site, and are going back to their search engine to find something else.

However, a high bounce rate isn't always a bad thing. Likewise, if the goal of your site is to get visitors to call your sales line, then a high bounce rate is OK provided that your visitors do end up calling your sales number.

What is a good Bounce Rate?

So what is a good bounce rate? As you've probably guessed from the above, it's hard to say, as it varies wildly from site to site and market to market. Every website and industry is different, so there is not one single rate or metric to look at. Instead, businesses should compare their sites with other similar sites and industries.

• Retail Sites - 20-40% Bounce Rate
• Simple Landing Pages - 70-90% Bounce Rate
• Portals - 10-30% Bounce Rate
• Service Sites - 10-30% Bounce Rate
• Content Sites - 40-60% Bounce Rate
• Lead Generation - 30-50% Bounce Rate

So, depending on where your kind of website falls within that spectrum, you should target that range of Bounce Rate (or better). Now do you clearly understand what is a good bounce rate? Personally to me for personal small business blogs a good bounce rate is 30-50. Don't be frustrated if you have a high rate. Try slowly to make it down.

Google Analytics definition for Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate of a web page= total number of bounces on a page (in a given time period) / total number of entrances on the page (in the same time period). Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
Here, Bounces is the number of single page visits resulting from the page and Entrances is the number of times visitors entered you site on the page

Bounce rate of a website = total number of bounces across all the pages on the website (in a given time period) / total number of entrances across all the pages on the website (in the same time period)

A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
If site entrance pages are not relevant to your visitors then you can’t expect any conversion, sales or leads. Your whole purpose of setting up a website has no commercial value. 

Reasons for high bounce rate

Bounce rates directly relate to the amount of time users are spending on your site. These four types of actions typically register as a bounce from your site:

1. Visitor clicks the back button
2. Visitor closes the browser
3. Visitor types a new URL
4. Visitor does nothing, and session times out

Slow page load times. People give up after 4 seconds. “I love slow web pages.” – said no one ever. Want to slow down your landing pages?

1. Use the cheapest hosting you can find. You pay for what you get. 
2. Add a few of oversized images that can’t be downloaded quickly. 
3. Use too many images that distract from the copy on your page and cause too many requests on each page load. 
4. Use custom fonts that must be downloaded before anyone can even read the page. 
5. Add a lot of fancy sliders and javascript effects that must also be downloaded to work.
   

All of these factors can lead to slow page loads. The golden rule is that people are going to leave if you make them wait more than 4 seconds for a page to download. Two seconds or less is really the ideal.

Your website is difficult to use

Maybe your site copy makes perfect sense to you, but visitors are left confused or, even worse, offended. It could also be that users are not visiting more pages because they can’t find them. Either because of poor layout, poor information architecture, technical errors, or malfunctioning buttons and page errors, users are left stranded.

Your website doesn’t meet user expectations

Unlike in the previous scenario, in which the user can’t easily leave the landing page, in this situation someone visits your website based on a promise that isn’t kept. If you do offer what they’re looking for it might not be easily located from the page they landed on. Users lack the motivation or time to scour every page you have, so it is crucial to remove the obstacles that cause them to give up and look elsewhere.

There is no Call to Action

This issue is quite comparable to to the “lack of usability/navigation” issue, though likely even more detrimental to your bounce rate. Users arrive to your site one way or another, and simply don’t know where to go next—the shopping cart is nowhere to be found, it’s not clear how to subscribe to your blog, etc. Whatever the activity you’ve designated as conversion, if the user has no idea what you want them to do, there is a huge problem.

13 Tips to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

Less bounces means more page views, which may translate into more revenue, more engagement, or a stronger connection with readers.

So how can we lower our bounce rate? Below are 19 tips that will help you get started.

Update your outdated content

Still have content from 2001 live telling people how to optimize their Myspace page?  You’ll want to fix that.
Even in less extreme cases, it’s important to keep old high-traffic posts up to date to keep your bounce rate down.

Don’t use popups… unless you’re using Bounce Exchange

In general, popups are awful for the user experience and should be avoided at all costs.
The only case where it’s (kind of) okay is when you’re using a tool like Bounce Exchange, which uses mouse tracking technology to identify when a user is about to bounce, and then shows a popup to reduce the likelihood of this. However, I’d argue that this is bad user experience.

Write shorter paragraphs

Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, which is why it’s important to write concisely and in short sentences.

Check ‘double meaning’ keywords

One of my old clients sold laboratory space. I was thrilled one day when I got into the office and noticed they ranked #1 on Google for ‘labs for sale’.
I was less thrilled when I noticed the surge in traffic had a 94% bounce rate, and my client had been receiving telephone enquiries all day from people wanting Labradors.

Give visitors all the information they may need

This is a point which perhaps applies to ecommerce more than other sites.
Let’s take an example from the travel sector. If you’re researching hotels to stay in, then the obvious destination for many web users is TripAdvisor.

There they can find (in theory) impartial views on the hotel which cut through the sales pitch on the hotel or travel agent’s website. However, once on TripAdvisor, they may be swayed by other hotels.
If you have reviews on site though, or have integrated TripAdvisor reviews on the page, then one reason to head elsewhere is removed.  

Make your site search more prominent

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug explains how some people are search-orientated and these users will look for a search box as soon as they enter a site. Don’t make it difficult for users to search for what they’re looking for.

Add more internal links

Internal links, like this one to our blog, keep people navigating around your website. Use them to reduce your bounce rate, and help users find what they’re looking for without searching.

Make your 404 page more useful

Google explicitly advises that your 404 error page should be useful in helping people find what they were looking for. They also advise using the enhanced 404 widget to include a search box on your 404 page.

Reduce your broken links

Lots of broken links will cause a poor user experience, driving your bounce rates up. Using the Webmaster Tools crawl error report, or a scraper like Screaming Frog, identify all of the broken links on your site and fix as many of them as possible.

Make your website mobile responsive

As stats from Gomez reveal, mobile visitors have even less patience than desktop visitors. Ensure your website has a responsive design to provide mobile users with a great user experience.

Make all external links open in a new window

For blogs, it’s likely that a large portion of your bounces are coming from people clicking on external links in your posts.
If you’re using WordPress, there’s a plugin that will automatically open all of your external links in a new tab. Otherwise, the easiest thing to do is to simple add target=”_blank” in all of your external links.

Do not use pagination

This could actually be posited as a way to reduce bounce rates, but I think the drawback of annoying users outweighs this particular aim.
People can scroll, so there's no need to paginate. The only reason I can think of is to falsely inflate page views. 



The bottom line is that you will be best served by targeting keywords for which you are able to provide quality, relevant content. Search engines will deliver the traffic and the better your content is, the more likely the visitors will be to spend more time on your site.