WHAT IS A LOW BOUNCE RATE?

Bounce rate is a very important metric for website owners. It
basically tells you what percentage of your visitors are "bouncing"
away after landing on your site (e.g., they just visit one page and
leave before clicking on to a second page inside your site). A
bounce can occur for several reasons, including:

* The visitor hit the "Back" button on his browser.
* The visitor closed his browser.
* The visitor clicked on one of your ads.
* The visitor clicked on one of your external links.
* The visitor used the search box on his browser.
* The visitor typed a new URL on his browser.

All the actions above would cause the visitor to leave your site.
Provided he did any of these actions right after arriving at your
site (and before clicking on to a second page), it would be counted
as a bounce. In fact the formula for finding the bounce rate on
your website is:

Bounce rate = Visits that left after one page / Total number of
visits

For example, if during a certain month your site received 120,000
visits, out of which 80,000 bounced after visiting just one page,
your bounce rate for that month would be 80,000 divided by 120,000,
which equals to 0.66 (or 66%). Notice that you can calculate the
bounce rate of your whole website or of single pages inside it.

Obviously the lower the bounce rate on your website, the better,
because it means that visitors are getting engaged by your content
and design, and that they are clicking to visit a second (third and
so on) page on your site.

How do you know the exact bounce rate on your site? A web analytics
program like Google Analytics will automatically track the numbers
for you.

WHAT IS A LOW BOUNCE RATE?

At this point you might be asking yourself what a low bounce rate
is. Is it 60%? Is it 30%? Unfortunately there is no definite answer
for this question. What is considered to be a low bounce rate will
vary, depending on the type of website that you have, on the
sources that are sending traffic to you and so on.

Content based websites like blogs and news portals, for example,
will naturally have a lower bounce rate than online stores or
product based websites, because on the former visitors will want to
read more articles, while on the latter they will either purchase
something or leave right away.

If you want some ballpark numbers, consider that a bounce rate of
80% or higher is considered high, regardless of the type of website
you have. Bounce rates between 40% and 80% are considered normal
for most websites, and a bounce rate below 40% is very good. Some
content sites and squeeze pages can have bounce rates below the 20%
mark, but this is rare.