If you are doing business on the web and have Google Analytics setup for your website, it’s very likely that you know the bounce rate for your website. But, do you know anything about how it’s calculated, what your industry’s average bounce rate is or even what factors affect your bounce rate? Inspired by common questions that we’ve heard, this infographic is meant to give you answers and some tips to help you improve your bounce rate.
Download the PDF or View an enlarged version of this Infographic »
Awesome Infographics ♥ Marketing Guides ♥ User Feedback Software ♥ Customer Analytics Software
Don’t always see Bounce Rate as a bad thing. Sometimes the user found exactly what they wanted and left. Especially true if they wanted contact details or a specific piece of information.
I couldn’t agree more to many people view the number of visitors and the bounce rate as the ‘complete picture’. People may well have found the information they were looking for. The best way is to track users via goals its about the quality of visits
If you have a page/site with lots of links to affiliate products or services… you WANT a high bounce rate.
Very true, where the come from what they do etc.
I agree with that… but as you said, it depends on what kind site you have. If you offer something that you know takes more time or requires more effort and the bounce rate isn’t right, then obviously you need to fix it.
What are the bounce rates of pricing and plans pages?
I agree with Jason. Placed telephone number in a visible area for a service business, Bounce rate increased and so did call volume and paying clients – which would you prefer?
Very good point! Although I think the two can work hand in hand. Good increase in telephone leads, but customers who are more informed. More lead generation of refined customers!
There are definitely ways to tweak the setup where you still get high call volume and at the same time, get more higher website conversion, lower bounce rate etc. It all depends on the testing you integrate.
Good point ;)
Informative post – I feel a lot better about my bounce rate numbers! I also had the experience of making contact information much more visible on the home page of a site and the bounce rate went up but so did the leads.
Yeah and that will happen sometimes, depending on what you offer.
I think bounce rate should be defined as “single page visits where no other action occurred”. I have landing pages with forms that have ajax confirmation pages. The visitor can view the page complete the form and leave. They only complete a single page view, but they still completed the action I intended.
Right, the intention of the page and the action the visitor takes *should be what’s more important.
Bounce rate could always mean that they wrote down your phone # and left.
Thanks for this post, it’s always important to know what you are measuring.
I agree, it could be as simple as something like that which means they got what they’re looking for and so did you ;).
Concerning the note about “visits to your subdomain will count as someone leaving your site” – wouldn’t the proper GATC hacks prevent subdomain visits from registering as a bounce?
They should, but most people don’t even use filters or know about them.
If you implement GA correctly with sub domain tracking, then a visit to a sub domain shouldn’t count as a bounce, or am I getting something wrong ?
Kevin,
Since you’re using an AJAX form, that is the only action that Google Analytics will see.
However, a neat way for you to improve the quality of the statistics that Google Analytics is collecting & also provide more useful information long term, would be to trigger a virtual pageview when the form is submitted successfully.
Now you can:
1) have a better indication of your true bounce rate
2) setup a Google Analytics goal for form success for ongoing monitoring
Everyone wins!
Al.
Then aren’t I artificially inflating my page views?
virtual pageview will artificially inflate your page views. however, you could use a GA event, which will neither increase your pageviews, or cause the visit to be counted as a bounce.
You’ll need to play around with it to see what works best for you as far as the info you receive.
Google Analytics does present things in a slightly confusing way for people who do not know. It shows on the dashboard total page views to the site or page on further reports next to bounce rate (which is just a % of entry page visits) so bounce rate of 50% does not mean half site traffic bounced. It means half the entry traffic bounced. This graphic does show this and looks very good.
Yeah that can be a bit confusing at first which is why it’s worth taking the time to read into it and learn about how everything works. The more you know the easier it’ll be for you to convert.
Another (and possibly more useful) measure is % of visitors who view the page and then leave…which is a different view. They may come to the page from another page and then leave. What’s making them leave? Can you engage them more. Pages with high exit rates should definitely be reviewed. But, as it’s been pointed out and quite rightly so, it also very much depends on the objective of the page. If it’s a cart and thats the final page, exit is going to be high, bounce low. So the two taken together are a good indicator of whats really happening.
Right, that’s always one of the most important factors. The tighter you have things down, the easier it’ll be to understand.
Cool infographic…enjoyed reading the industry metrics about Bounce rate.
I agree with you Vivek, glad you found it intriguing too.
Great info graphic… thanks so much. Often times I find clients can’t get a good grasp on bounce rates. I’m going to send them to this page for more info now!
That’s a good idea since it’ll clearly paint a picture they should easily understand.
Wait a second, where is the time factor in all of this? I could have sworn that I’ve read on numerous occasions that bounce rate calculations factor in people that leave within X amount of seconds (e.g. 5). Otherwise, the metric becomes useless since your exact goal might be for your audience to read something or engage in a particular action right on your landing page.
Can someone please elaborate on this?
I always liked Avinash Kaushik’s analogy of bounce rates: They came. They puked. They left.
Assuming you’re not triggering pageviews yourself – i.e. you’re just loading up the standard tracking code on your pages – the amount of time spent on a single page in your domain has no role in whether a visit is counted as a bounce.
This is because Google Analytics only tracks once, when a page initially loads. So if I load a page on your domain and stay there for an hour, then close the tab, GA never registers anything but the initial page load, and my visit is counted as a bounce.
Just a quick follow-up for clarification.
Time is taken into account in one respect, but it’s a bit of an edge case.
If I open your domain in a tab and only look at a single page, then I leave the tab open for a few hours (or overnight), come back to it and navigate to another page on your domain, the initial visit will be counted as a bounce, and the subsequent navigation to the second page will be counted as a visit.
GA counts activity that occurs after a 30 minute pause as a new visit, per default.
From: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html
A visitor session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity on your website, or when the browser exits. Google Analytics is able to determine the start of a new session by the absence of either session cookie. You can customize the length of the default session time using the _setSessionCookieTimeout() method.
Excellent infographic – Bounce rate is for sure one of the most important metrics in web analytics.
I agree, it’ll give you some great feedback on things you need to change.
Very good! I’m bookmarking this to show clients. Good clarity of information. Much better than me trying to explain it!
Thanks for the good post!
Yeah I would completely agree with you on that, especially with clients who are visual.
Hey guys – excellent content to share with my Web Design and Web Content Management classes. One question though – would it be possible to get a vector (.eps) file of the poster so I can print an enlarged copy to post in our projects room. I’ve been collecting and printing things like this so I always have one hand to show. Makes for wonderful conversation with students and a neat way to influence them as they work. THanks for the great info -
If you can, email me at npatel@kissmetrics.com asking for it. I’ll see what I can do. ;-)
Just wondering if you have your own website set as the home page and you
launch your browser many times a day then leave the page, does that effect your bounce rate?
Yes – but you can (and should) tell GA to ignore your own visits, either by filtering visits from your IP address (assuming you usually visit from the same IP) or by setting a special cookie value to identify you as someone to ignore.
You should also tell GA to ignore visits from co-workers and other people whose visits to the site you don’t want to track.
For more info on how to tell Google Analytics to ignore hits from “internal” visitors, see the following help article:
How do I exclude my internal traffic from reports?
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481
A blog can have high bounce rates and still be a great blog. People only come to read a blogpost and then leave. That does not mean that they puked and left.
That’s exactly why it’s so important… if they just come, read, and leave, you’re missing out potentially sales, subscriptions, or whatever it is your’re trying to accomplish.
Great way of showing this information, will be great to show this to our sales force who regularly make up what bounce rate is!!
Thanks
lol, yeah it’s a better idea for them to use this then make it up.
Great to see an infographic that isn’t re-hashed. This is good info for our small business clients who still don’t have a good grip on what influences bounce rates.
It definitely is… this should allow people to understand bounce rates a lot easier.
That graphic is brilliant, makes it very easy to understand.
It concerns me a little about my site though – the landing page is a long copy sales letter with the call to action embedded so I’d imagine my bounce rate is going to be unusually high and impact my search engine ranking…..
For sales letters, the bounce rates is usually higher than other pages. Take a look at the graph again and you’ll see that the type of website you have also makes a huge difference.
Great post and even more interesting comments. Like others here I never read to much into bounce rates either but it is very good to know what the averages are across different types of pages.
Right I’m off to check out the rest of KISSmetrics as I have never seen this blog before and want to keep your bounce rate down. If the rest is this interesting I’ll be tweeting and posting links on my site.
Thanks
Well it’s good to have you on board with our blog. Hopefully you get a ton of value and learn something you can easily apply. Thanks for helping us keep the bounce rate down ;)
Neil:
This was very helpful! I particularly like the idea of a glossary section defining terms. Sometimes, I need that myself!!
I agree, it’s definitely a great resource to have for future reference.
Nothing like an infographic to simplify complex matters!
Thanks for this, very helpful.
Exactly! This should hopefully make the concept a lot easier to explain.
Hi, thank you for sharing these data.
One question : industry metrics are a rare info to have. How did you get them ?
research ;)
Great infographic! I’ll definitely take that into consideration when I’m looking at the analytics statistics of my site from now on.
That’s a good move, it’s definitely a good resource to have to refer back to.
The infographic states:
“Google takes your bounce rate into account as one of many factors when determining how to rank your site.”
However, Google has gone on the record to state that they do not use Google Analytics data in ranking websites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
That’s correct, they aren’t using data from Google Analytics.
I love how your articles always have a nice complimentary infographics.
It’s so much easier to read isn’t it ;)?
I have 1.55% bounce rate in my Greek dating blog for previous month. It is possible? Tell me your opinion.
That’s quite a low bounce rate and doesn’t sound accurate.
Nice infographic!
I came across Avinash’s definition of bounce rate a while ago that takes the visit duration into consideration.
For Eg: Visitors who stayed for more than 5 seconds are not considered bounces according to this definition.
Source: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html
hmm, that’s interesting. There are many different variables to take into account since people perceive them differently.
very helpful, I was unclear (due to bad definition by Google and disagreement with my former boss) if a site’s bounce rate was effected by a visitor going to another page on your site (same primary domain). According to this the visitor must exit the site within 5 seconds to be considered a bounce. Let me know if I’m incorrect.
We have the same definition. :)
Hi Neil,
this is very interesting esp. to a GA beginner. Couple of questions-
1) Sharing cookies across Domains and Sub Domains to get an accurate bounce rate- if i have a link to a sub-domain or a link to a different domain on my site, do i need to allow cross domain tracking to ensure an accurate bounce rate? from the above conversation, it sounds like if i do not make any effort to share cookies across domains and sub domains, then clicking on links that take me away from the current page (Even though they are part of the client’s ecosystem) will count as a bounce. Is that true?
2) Impact of using the same tracking code on a domain and a sub-domain and its impact on the bounce rate- What is the impact of using the same tracking code across a domain and sub-domain, without making modifications to share cookies?
In order words, if i dont make modifications to share cookies across domains and subdomains, will navigating between these properties, which have the same tracking code, count as a bounce?
Thanks in advance!
Not all bounce rates are the same. I have a high bounce rate because I have a lot of images in Google. When people do a search on google for images google will display the image in front of the page and that counts as a hit. Then the user leaves the image and you get a bounce so the bounce rate could be higher and if the keywords are the same for web/image then you can’t decipher between the two.
Хочется уточнить, а этот форум ползуется спросом? Только зарегился:вот интересуюсь. Спасибо!
Прочитал тут – читайте – очень интересно
This is a great and very useful infographic. Thanks very much for putting it together!
Is it possible to get deeper definitions of the types of sites? “Service Sites” is particularly vague (I know there’s only so much room in an infographic!).
How much extrenal links is normal to have? I think below 100 in index page is ok but what is happend if you have 300 external links?
A helpful visual primer, but I would caution anyone using those industry benchmarks since they come from a 2006 forum post based on the data from a consultant who clearly states that they should be taken with a “huge pinch of salt”.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/message/6116
Thanks for the source. I was wondering where those numbers came from.
As a pro blogger, I try to keep the bounce rate under 50% but IT IS TOUGH. These days I don’t bother about it much. I just make it a point to deliver interactive content and let the Analytics do its job :)
Great post. Really interesting stuff. Thanks
This helped me understand bounce rates a lot!
thanks
I am not sure I agree with the section in the Infographic on Improving Bounce Rate. It is more of “fix the page” approach and not “correct the source”.
I see Bounce rate as a measure of effectiveness of marketing campaigns (or sources of traffic) and not necessarily the page itself.
Inherently, bounce rate talks about entries to the page. Some of which we control, some we do not. So, looking at an aggregate metric across all sources of traffic is not the right approach.
I wrote a small post on Bounce Rate some time back where I elaborate on the above. http://subhash.tumblr.com/post/15344288944/misused-metrics-bounce-rate
~Subhash Surampudi
PS: Saw this posted on getelastic.com.
IT would be very interesting to see the average figures broken down to industries…