Bounce rate is one my favorite stats in Google Analytics, and one that I think is highly underrated.
A “bounce” happens when someone comes to your website, skims your page and leaves without taking any action.
I know you’ve done this. Sometimes you type in the wrong URL in your browsers and bounce to a different site as soon as you realize your error.
Sometimes you land on a page that just seems like it’s a mountain of text and you don’t have the energy to wade through. So you bounce to something easier.
Still other times you go to a site that’s so ugly it hurts your eyes and you want to get it off your screen, so you bounce immediately.
What bounce rate tells you
The bounce rate is the percentage of people that bounce. If you have a 52% bounce rate that means that for every 100 people landing on your site, 52 of them bounce.
What that tells you is that your site, or at least certain pages of it, aren’t resonating with half of the people that visit your site. That’s a bummer because you put a lot of work into your website, and you want to use it to gain new business.
That said, a 52% bounce rate is incredibly good. Most often, I see rates in the 70s and 80s. The lower this number is the better, but a 50% bounce rate is a great goal to work toward.
Bounce rate v. engagement rate
In the previous iteration of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics), bounce rate was the predominant stat. In fact, Google included bounce rate in every single report they produced.
With the onset of the new platform, GA4, engagement rate takes center stage, which seems to just be a happier spin on bounce rate.
Google defines the engagement rate as:
The number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions over a specified time period. An engaged session is a session that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 page views.
You’ll see in the chart below that bounce rate and engagement rate are opposites. Google’s going to default to giving you engagement rate, but if you’re a creature of habit like I am, you can switch to showing bounce rate.
What the data means
However you decide to view your data, these stats are important ones, so let’s talk about how to use the information.
Let’s say you are looking at a report of the different pages on your website to see how they are performing. If we use the chart below, the first thing that might catch your eye is that the first line has an average of 40 seconds on the page while the second line averaged 8 seconds.
We could assume that makes page 1 more value.
But then we look a little closer and see that the second line has a bounce rate of 0. Yes zero, nada. That means every single person that comes to that page takes some kind of action.
Compare that to the other page which has 100% bounce rate, telling us that every person comes to the page, spends their 40 seconds and then leaves.
Now you might be scratching your head trying to decide which metric matters more – longer sessions or lower bounce rate?
This is where we turn on our thinking caps and go beyond the basic data.
It turns out that the first item is a blog page like this one. People are taking the time to read it, but then they leave the site immediately. They don’t contact us, or look at any of our services – not ideal.
The second item is a landing page for a free resource, like this one. There’s not a lot of text to read, so we’re not going to worry about the 8 seconds; we’re going to get excited about the fact that all of the people that came to the page took some kind of action, like entering their email to get the resource.
How to use numbers to improve your website
We’ve learned that our blog posts are doing a good job bringing people to the site, and they are taking the time to read them. That’s a win.
Now we want to take things a step further and try to tempt those people to engage with us further. One way to do that is to use the blog posts as a way to advertise the free downloads, like the banner at the bottom of this page.
Another option is to include links to other pages within your blog post, or add a prompt to read a blog on a similar topic.
Decide what you can do to make the page more engaging and make your changes, and then set a reminder to go back into Google Analytics in a month and check the bounce rate for that page.
- If it goes down: Woot! You’re a super star, you just found a way to increase your conversions and get more value out of your website.
- If it stays the same. Go back to the drawing board and try again. If the blog post was about email marketing and you offered up a check list on social media, it may not have been a natural progression. Try to phrase things differently or make your offer more visual to be more appealing.
And that my friends, is how you turn a mountain of data into real-world insights that can make a significant impact on the success of your marketing programs – and your business as a whole.
Need help doing this type of stuff? We’re only an email away!
