What is a Bounce Rate?- How Does a Bounce Rate Work?

We are sure you will have so many questions when someone mentions the bounce rate and how it affects their website. You might think, “Is a 100% bounce rate a good thing?” Should you be worried about the bounce rate of your website? Do emails have bounce rates as well? Or is it just a vanity metric that one should ignore and focus on other aspects of analysis? If I want to fix it, what are the things that I should be doing? These questions are common when starting your journey as a digital marketer or a website owner. 

If you are asking these questions, you should not be worried, as you are not the only one asking them. Many online marketers have asked the same question, and when they truly understand the importance of bounce rate, they make their website grow so much better in many ways. If you haven’t figured out the answer to the question “What is bounce rate?” Then you have landed in the right spot. 

With this article’s help, we will determine how many bounce rates suit a website. Along with this, we aim to show you different methods you can use to improve your bounce rate and the impact of bounce rate on your website’s online presence. So let’s begin.

How Does a Bounce Rate Work?

The bounce rate is known as the percentage of visitors that leave your website without taking any form of action. An action could be clicking on a link, filling out a form, or even purchasing products or services you provide on your website. Dividing the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on the site calculate a bounce rate. Let’s take an example to understand calculating bounce rate much better. 

So let’s say you have 1000 users who are landing on your website, so these 1000 users will generate 1000 sessions. So now you have 1000 total sessions. From these 1000 sessions, 250 of the users left your website without triggering any form of request, meaning they didn’t click on any button. didn’t fill out any form, or moved to another page on your website. As a result, your website’s bounce rate will be 25%. We calculated this by using the following formula.

• website bounce rate = single-page sessions / total sessions X 100
• ​​website bounce rate = 250/1000 X 100
• website bounce rate = 0.25 X 100 
• website bounce rate = 25%

Any form of bounce rate, no matter if it’s of a whole website or a single web page, is calculated in the same way. But the metrics will remain page-specific. Now, if we take the same example and find out that 500 users have landed on your homepage, and of those 500 users, 20 users have taken the exit from the homepage without triggering any form of request on your homepage. Then if we input the following information into our formula, the bounce rate would be 4%.

• website bounce rate = single-page sessions / total sessions X 100
• ​​website bounce rate = 20/500 X 100
• website bounce rate = 0.04 X 100 
• website bounce rate = 4%

Now that you understand how a bounce rate works, it’s time to focus on its importance. The main advantage of understanding the concept of bounce rate is that it will show you how the user engages with your content or the website. In addition, it will also provide you with enough information as to where something is wrong on your website that is causing users to exit without triggering any form of request on your website.

What is a Good Bounce Rate?

Honestly, there is no such thing as a typical bounce rate. Currently, there are over 4 billion web pages on the internet. As a result, we can’t confine all of these web pages to one metric, given there is so much variety present in the industries, websites, and web pages, along with the diversity in the audience.

Apart from this, defining the bounce rate of a website could also turn into a subjective preference based on the type of web page we have in the first place, in addition to the traffic source. For example, if you have an informational article that caters to a specific set of visitors and the primary source of the traffic on the website where you posted this article is all organic, then the bounce rate could be as high as 80% of the total traffic.

That really doesn’t mean your page is getting an alarming bounce rate; even though it is causing a high bounce rate, it could also mean that the user has found the required information in a short amount of time and, therefore, they have closed the tab on which that specific article was opened.

The research done by Hubspot created a rough benchmark for the bounce rate for different industries by taking in thousands of websites from each. But remember that these numbers are just a grain of salt in the vast number of websites on the internet. So, if you want a rough idea of your pages’ performance, you can compare them to the numbers below.

• Content websites will have a 40% – 60% of average bounce rate. 
• Lead generation websites such as digital marketing services and product selling websites should be expecting bounce rate to be around 70% – 90%
• On the other hand, websites that have primary content related to the blog post should aim at a 20% – 40% of bounce rate. 
• Regarding e-commerce and retail websites, the average bounce rate, according to the industry, is 10% – 30%. 
• Lastly, no matter to which industry you belong, your landing page will have a bounce rate of 70% – 90%.

Does Having a High Bounce Rate Good for a Website?

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website or return to the search results to refer to another website for the same query. The bounce rate could also increase when a user idles on a page for over 30 minutes. Is having a high bounce rate bad for your website? Well, the plain and simple answer is “Yes!!”

There are many ways for your website to showcase high bounce rates. Below, we have pointed out some of the reasons that lead to high bounce rates and tips on how you can fix them.

Slow-to-Load Pages

For the past five years, Google has preferred those pages with higher site speed in its search results. You need to rank higher; a slow-to-load web page could be a huge problem and increase the bounce rate. Right now, site speed is a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Google is always looking for content that could provide a positive experience for users. When your website loads slowly, it results in a poor experience, which Google doesn’t want people to see in the first place.

Everyone is looking to get their results in the shortest amount of time. Even if your page is taking a few more seconds to load, visitors will get fed up and move to the next website to get the answer. Regarding fixing site speed, there is no end point to it for SEO experts. It is continuous, as you add new content to the website daily or occasionally.

With each incremental fix, you will see a gradual boost in the speed of your website. You can go to Google PageSpeed Insight, Lighthouse Reports, Pingdom, and more to find specific recommendations for your site. It could be compressing the image, reducing the third-party scripts in your website’s code, browser caching, and more.

Few of Your Web Pages Have Dispositional Contribution

There could be some pages on your website that are causing more bounces than the rest of the website. Google is quite peculiar about these pages, and it can quickly recognize them in no time. You can take the help of advanced filters to remove the pages that may skew the results. You need to develop the minimum threshold of volume that is significant for the page. You need to find out what makes sense for your website, and it could be anything from 100 visitors visiting your page in an hour to 1000 visitors visiting a specific page in a single day.

Find Out If Your Website Has Misleading Title Tag Or Meta Description 

You should consider whether your web page’s title tag or meta description adequately and accurately summarizes the content on your page. If the meta description or the title tags are inaccurate, visitors will visit your website and won’t stick around to go through the full content as they don’t know what it is in the first place. It could be an innocent mistake, something you didn’t know about, or you are just trying to play the system by optimizing your title tag with the keyword clickbait.

But this problem can be fixed in no time. All you have to do is review your content and then adjust the title tag and meta description. This way, you will be attracting the right visitors to your website who have already read the correct information about the page from the meta description and the title tag that is shown on the result page.

Blank Page Error

If you have an exceptionally high bounce rate and you see viewers spending less than 5 to 10 seconds on your website, your web page is showing nothing to users, or it could be returning an error 404. You can take a look at the page and see for yourself what is causing all these problems. Check out the web page from the most popular web browser and the devices people use to replicate the user experience. You can correct this issue yourself or get help from others who know how to get over the 404 error and make your website’s content return to that specific web page.

Bad Link From Another Website

You might be doing everything perfectly for your website to grow. But still, you are getting an average or low bounce rate from the organic search results, which, in truth, results in a higher bounce rate from your referral traffic. That means the referring website sends unwanted visitors to your website using anchor text or context that does not align with your field.

Sometimes this could result from sloppy copywriting, meaning that the writer of the referral website has put your link in the wrong part of the text that doesn’t make sense to the audience. In this case, you can reach out to the website’s author and ask them to change it. You can, on the other hand, request that they remove the link from their site or update the context for the link so that it makes sense.

In some cases, the referring website might be trying to sabotage you with implementing negative SEO. No matter what they think, you still need to reach them out and ask them to change the context or permanently remove the link from their website. If this can’t be done, you can go to the disavow file in your search console and disavow the link to show Google that it should not be taking the site’s link to account regarding determining the quality and relevance of your site’s content.

Bounce Rate Vs. Exit Rate

Let’s start the difference between the two by writing down their definitions.

The bounce rate is the percentage of single-engagement sessions.

The exit rate is the percentage of exits that have taken place on your specific web page.

The bounce rate, as we said, is calculated by finding the number of bounces over the total number of page views on a page. A bounce will occur on your web page when a user visits the web page and subsequently leaves it without even visiting another page on your website or without interacting with any elements present on the web page.

On the other hand, when we look at the exit rate, we can see it is about the number of people who exited your website after they visited a specific page. We calculate it by comparing the number of exits divided by the total number of views that the page has received. The definition given by Google can easily confuse you as these two metrics also sound similar, and that is because the primary goals of these two are identical. 

The exit rates are the percentage of the visits present last in the session. Whereas if we look at the bounce rate, it is the percentage of visits that were the only ones of the session. This means that the bounce rate will only be recorded if a user exits directly from the page from which they have entered the website. It doesn’t matter what the user activity is prior to opening the specific web page. This also means that all bounces are exits, but not all exits are bounces.

To clarify the difference between these two, let’s take an example: you have a website with four pages: the home page, the about us page, the product page, and the contact us page. From now on, 1000 visitors have come to your website from the home page, and around 750 move to the product page. But 200 of the users moved to the contact us page. The remaining 50 returned to the search engine to look for the result on another website. As a result, the bounce rate of your web page will be 5%.

At the same time, some of your viewers have entered your website from the contact page, and from there, they have returned back to the search engine or closed the tab. In that case, your bounce rate will be higher, but that doesn’t mean your website didn’t have the right content to satisfy a user’s needs. If all 750 users who moved from the home page to the product page exited the product page, the product page’s exit rate will be 100% of all 750 who exited after purchasing the product. On the other hand, if 200 of those users move forward to the contact us page, then the exit rate will be calculated in the following manner:

• Total number of users who entered the product page = 750
• Total number of users who entered the contact us page = 200
• Total number of user who exited from the product page = 750 – 200= 550

By dividing the total number of users who exited the product page by the total number of users who entered it, we get 750. Following are the calculations as a result.

• Exit rate percentage = 550/750 X 100
• Exit rate percentage = 0.7333 X 100
• Exit rate percentage = 73.3%

This is how we can determine a web page’s exit rate percentage. Bounce rate and exit rate do not influence each other. There is a difference between the two metrics.

How Does Bounce Rate Influence Your Online Presence?

The bounce rate is one of the essential statistics that will reflect the percentage of visitors on your website who leave when they click the back button. A bounce rate can do a lot of things. The most prominent way it influences the online presence of a website is by demonstrating that more and more people are bouncing back to its search engine, resulting in the search engine’s algorithm understanding that the website does not have the required information that the users are looking for.

Thus, it will slowly drop the website, and you will start having fewer visitors to your website for the same keyword or query. So you need to maintain a bounce rate somewhere around the average to stay on top of the search engine result page.

Wrapping Up

This is what bounce rate is all about; if you are not careful tracking it down, it could ruin your website. When you compare bounce rates by channel, you can determine where traffic is being hindered. When one of the channels shows a higher bounce rate than the other, it’s time to identify the problem and fix it. We hope this article has helped you understand the meaning of bounce rate and that you are no longer confused between bounce rate and exit rate. Feel free to comment if there is anything else you would like to know about the bounce rate, and we will respond accordingly. Enjoy your learning until then!

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