What does Bounce Rate mean?

As a user of Siteimprove Analytics, you may have come across a metric on your dashboard called bounce rate. This article is intended to explain bounce rate metrics and offer tips to interpret your bounce rate.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce rate can be calculated for the entire website or an individual page.

Website Bounce Rate

Your Website's Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages and then leave (bounce) without visiting another page. Bounce rate is calculated from single-page visits divided by the total number of visits on the site.

Pages Bounce Rate

An individual Pages Bounce Rate is calculated from the entries to that page (i.e. an entry being the users first page view of the visit to the site). The Page Bounce Rate is calculated from single-page visits on a particular entry page divided by the total number of site entry visits on the page. 

For example, if a site has 83 entries on a particular page and 38 of these entries just visit that single page the the bounce rate is 100(38/83) = 45.78 %. 

High bounce rates might indicate the website is not doing a good job of attracting the continued interest of visitors. Perhaps the visitor did not find what he or she was looking for, or the webpage is simply too difficult to use. However, high bounce rates are not necessarily a bad thing! It all depends on what website goals you have and what actions you need visitors to take on your website.

When is a High Bounce Rate Acceptable?

High bounce rates could be a good thing if your visitor has a positive experience, for example: 

• The visitor only needed information such as opening hours, the customer service hotline, or a "contact us" button
• Visitor found what he or she was looking for and did not need to visit additional pages
• External links on the page directed the visitor to another website
• The visitor found a specific page on your website through search engines and did not need more information

Consider the purpose and content of the page, and to determine whether the page should have a high or low bounce rate.

What Can I Do to Lower My Bounce Rate?

There are countless ways to improve your bounce rate by offering more value to your visitors. At a minimum, make sure you address the following issues:  

• Minimize errors and broken links to instantly build trust with your visitors
• Make sure content is well-written and includes information relevant to your page title
• Split long articles into multiple pages to avoid overwhelming your users with too much text
• Provide access to related content on your website by linking to similar articles or products
• Ensure pages load quickly and any images render as expected