What is Bounce Rate?

You need to be aware of your bounce rate because it is a metric that highly influences your conversion rate. A high bounce rate can imply a bad user experience and it can also affect your marketing efforts on channels like Google. A high bounce rate might mean that your website content is irrelevant and uninteresting to users, so why would Google show your web pages to them?

Don’t confuse bounce rate with exit rate, as the latter looks at the percentage of people who exited any page of your website after they could have navigated on the website for a while and it is not as alarming as the bounce rate. The exit rate on the thank you page, for example, is usually high because that is basically the last step in a user’s journey after they placed an order.

Well, a 0% bounce rate is ideal but not realistic. To give you an idea, an average bounce can range between 26% to 70%, and an optimal one should be between 26% and 40%. If you have less than a 20% bounce rate which is highly unlikely, there’s a big probability that your data is inaccurate due to faulty tracking implementation, any kind of add-ons from third parties, or even duplicate code.

Moreover, the device used by users can highly influence your perception of the bounce rate. Mobile users usually generate the highest bounce rate across all industries at 51%, desktop users generate an average of 43%, and tablet users an average of 45% bounce rate. You need to be looking at your main source of traffic in order to assess how high your bounce rate is.

It all depends on your objectives and the content you offer to the user. If you want to influence the customer to stick around and navigate more pages (usually for eCommerce), a high bounce rate can negatively influence other important metrics, such as your conversion rate.

If you have over 70% average bounce rate, it should give you an indication that you need to change something. In this case, a bad bounce rate can indicate technical problems on the website such as broken links, high page loading time, irrelevant content for the user, low security against bots, low mobile optimization score, etc. A high amount of new website traffic generated from Facebook / Google Ads can also increase the bounce rate.

However, if you only need the user to do one action on the landing page, such as writing a review, sending you a message, or reading a blog post for example, a high bounce rate can be normal.