I read an article recently that suggested your worry over high bounce rates is totally unfounded.
Well, maybe not unfounded. But certainly not worth fixing.
Chris Goward over at WiderFunnel, lifts a heavy burden off the average website owner. He warns that focusing too much on your bounce rate may be counter-productive.
Whew! I like that.
His point is valid: Newbies to analytics see a high bounce rate and fixate on it. Their goal shifts from conversion (meaning sales or business leads) toward lowering that number, which can actually hurt the profitability of their site.
The trouble is, a high bounce rate may not be a problem.
Maybe you make an offer with the acceptance form on the same page. After filling out the form, people exit, giving you a bounce. (But you got the conversion.)
Maybe you send them to an off-site page to purchase a product. That would register as a bounce, even though they’re doing what you asked them to do.
Or maybe your goal is simply for visitors to read your page. That’s my goal for this page—and I’m sure, if you’re a blogger, you have a similar goal.
The trouble is, bounce rate is extremely misunderstood, so it’s worth taking a closer look at this bad boy to figure out if it’s something you need to worry about.
First, your target numbers
What is an appropriate bounce rate for your website? I’ve searched for this information countless times over the past few years and finally found a good answer.
This chart is from Kayden Kelly’s article, What is Bounce Rate? Avoid Common Pitfalls. (It’s a great article, by the way, and well worth reading.)
Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate
- 40-60% Content websites
- 30-50% Lead generation sites
- 70-98% Blogs
- 20-40% Retail sites
- 10-30% Service sites
- 70-90% Landing pages
As you can see, if you run a customer service or retail site, you can expect wonderfully low bounce rates since people will be browsing your pages for the perfect answer/product.
But notice the numbers for landing pages and blogs. If you’ve been worrying about a bounce rate of 80% on your blog, you can finally relax. That’s about average.
Why so high? Think about it. You promote your articles over social media, and if they sound interesting, people click through. These people are interested in one thing: reviewing your article to see if it’s worth reading.
If it is, great, they’ll skim or read—whichever they have time for—then exit. If not, they exit right away. Either way, this visit registers as a bounce.
Now, if you’re a smart content marketer, you also have internal links embedded in your article and “Related Articles” at the end of it. The hope, of course, is that highly engaged readers will click through to see more of your work.
But as you know, that’s not the norm.
What if you try to fix this number?
That depends. Fixing the bounce rate could easily affect your other business objectives for the page. In which case, you’d be making a big mistake.
For a business blog, you may have an objective of simply having people read your content. But what if your goal is to get people to opt in to your email list.
If you’re focused on lowering your bounce rate, you may ask people to click through to another page to opt in. But research has shown that most people only read half of an article anyway. If they have to click to another page, hang it up.
People do what’s easiest, and that doesn’t include click-through. You’ll do better to put the opt-in form below your article, bounce rate be hanged.
The bottom line is this: Your bounce rate is an interesting measure, but it isn’t the end-all in analytics. Don’t get fixated on it. Instead, worry more about your business goals.
Learn more about bounce rates
In researching this article, I found a handful of really good resources on this (not-so) important metric.
Take a look…
Google Analytics Bounce Rate (actually) Demystified, by Yehoshua Coren, the Analytics Ninja. I didn’t realize until I read this article that your bounce rate can be too low, but apparently it can. If it’s lower than the ranges listed above, you may not be getting an accurate reading, in which case you need to find what’s broken and fix it.
What factors can affect your bounce rate? Things like having the code more than once on the page. Check out Yehoshua’s article to learn more.
Bounce Rate, on Google Analytic’s support site (which, by the way, probably has a low bounce rate since it’s a support site). This is a short explanation of bounce rate, directly from the source. And if you’re interested, there are some added links in the sidebar that will give you loads more information (and lower their bounce rate all the more).
Towards a True Bounce Rate, by Jonathan Allen, on Search Engine Watch. Jonathan found an inherent flaw in the way bounce rates were being measured and took his findings to Google, who created an “adjusted bounce rate” metric in response. Pretty impressive. Read this article to learn when a bounce rate isn’t a bounce rate.
What do you think? Is bounce rate still a worry, or do you feel a little less stressed by that number? Let me know your thoughts below.
