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Answering the Question, “What Is a Good Bounce Rate?”
Posted by: Jacob Wolfsheimer, Search Engine Marketing Manager May 11, 2010 2 Comments
As an interactive project manager here at Rock Creek, clients often ask me about the more technical side of online marketing. One common question I’ve heard before is, “What is a good bounce rate?” In most cases, the client is asking because they think that by measuring their bounce rates against those of competing businesses or organizations, they’ll have a better idea of how well their website is performing. So imagine how surprised our clients are when I explain to them that when it comes to bounce rates, the only numbers that matter are those of their own site.
The bounce rate of a site depends on virtually every factor of a user’s decision-making process when arriving at a website. For example, a high bounce rate might be the result of a number of different elements, including:
- Irrelevant keywords, links, or other sources of traffic driving visitors to the site
- A poor overall user experience, including difficulty understanding the navigation
- Content that’s not engaging
- A design that that distracts from the site’s content
Factors like these all combine to help a person quickly determine if the site is worth further exploration or if they should return to the search results. And these factors don’t even take into consideration external factors, such as the visitor’s attention level upon arriving to the site, their available time to read the content, and their motivation for arriving.
It would be perhaps an impossible task to control all of these elements outside of a structured usability testing lab, and difficult even in those circumstances. That’s why it’s so important that organizations don’t focus on chasing competitors’ bounce rate, but instead spend energy on driving their own site’s bounce rates lower. A good bounce rate is the one that is lower than it was before, since it shows that tweaks or changes to the site or its campaigns have been successful.
Comments
Jacob May 12, 2010
Dharma, I completely agree. A user like you describe could fall under a category of users where the “motivation for arriving” has resulted in a bounce, though it wouldn’t appear in the analytics and still be considered a successful visit.
This is why companies like Clicky are redefining a bounce to only include visitors who land on a page and stay for less than 30 seconds before leaving. I’d argue grabbing a phone number would take less than 30 seconds, but it’s certainly a start.
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Dharma May 12, 2010
Good points, Jacob.
Also, when evaluating bounce rates it is important to keep in mind that some pages will have high bounce rates, but that those are not necessarily indicative of poor performance.
For example, if a user wants our phone number, visits our homepage, jots down the number and leaves immediately, then that page has served its purpose, although you would not know if from just looking at the analytics.