What’s Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a metric that shows you how many visitors that do completely nothing on the page they entered. This means they don’t give any response to your internal links on the page. Internal link means a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page. In the other words, Google analytics server doesn’t get any trigger from the visitor.
This will cause Google to think these three things:
- The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
- Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
- Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.
In SEO perspective, it is important to optimize every aspect of your site. By looking closely at your bounce rate, you can optimize your website even further. No wonder many SEO services attempt to keep their client’s page free from any bounce rate.
But bounce rate doesn’t mean bad all the time. In fact, it is okay to have bounce rates in some cases. As bounce rate really depends on the purpose of the page. Bounce rate isn’t a bad thing per se if the purpose of the page is to purely inform. For example, read a post or find an address.
So, the best solution is by creating a segment that contains “New visitors” only. If you discover that bounce rate of your new visitors is high, it’s time reevaluate user engagement with your site. To reduce the bounce rate, you can add a clear call-to-action, a ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ button. Moreover, being clear from the start with what visitors could expect will also give good point to your bounce rate. There more things that you also need to consider when optimizing your page. For instance, internal links that point to related pages or posts. Having a menu that is easy to use will also prevent your site experience a high bounce rate.
From a conversion perspective, bounce rate can be used as a metric to measure success. Bear in mind changing the design of your page will shake your bounce rate. It will cause the bounce rate increase or oppositely decrease in bounces. This explains why you have low conversion rate.
Or you can also compare your site with other popular pages and learn from the pages with low bounces rates. Usually, an unnaturally low bounce rate is caused by an event that triggers the Google Analytics server. Think of pop-ups, auto-play of videos or an event you’ve implemented that fires after 1 second. Besides, you can also use a tool that can track scrolling counts. This count is helpful as you can know whether your visitors actually scroll down the page and read your content.
This makes bounce rate is different from exit rate. In general, exit rate is a metric that displays percentage of page views that were last in the session. So, it is about users deciding to end their session on your website on that particular page.