Web Page Bounce Rate Explained and What to Do About a High Rate

Website page bounce rate is defined by Wikipedia as ” the percentage of visitors who enter the site and ‘bounce’ (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.” You can view your own website bounce rate figures on the “Audience Overview” link in Google Analytics. As a point of reference, Google Analytics reported that last year the average global bounce rate was 46.9%.

If you look at your own website and see a bounce rate figure like mine (which is 84.95%) don’t get worked up. The most important next step is to go to the “Content”  link and select “Site Content” and then “Pages” in Google Analytics to see where the truth to your bounce rate lies.

In my own personal case, I have been writing for my website and adding white papers and instructional how-to’s since 2001. I have some interesting free content that I offer such as how to change your signature in Outlook, how to set up multiple email accounts in Outlook, how to create an address group in Outlook, and many other similar topics that are not focused on my own services. Many of these pages get several thousand unique visitors each month but are associated with high bounce rates. I have provided these special pages in my website as link bait and traffic multipliers, but as a result some of these high traffic pages have boosted my website’s aggregate average bounce rate.

In my case, important service pages in my website do have bounce rates that track closer to the global average of 46.9% or are lower.  What I feel is more important to mature websites, such as my own, is to evaluate the bounce rate on a per page basis. That being said, once you have identified high traffic pages in your own website, use those pages to drive social media traffic by encouraging Facebook likes, newsletter subscriptions or consider putting banners advertising your own services on them to try to take advantage of the high one time traffic. You may be able to convert some of these one-time visitors at least into newsletter subscribers.

Although I want to continue to offer some informational content for free, I have started to try to put these pages to work for me so that I get a benefit from the traffic while trying to move some of these visitors into helping to promote my name through social networking. You don’t necessarily want to remove these high bounce rate pages from your website, but instead need to identify what they are and then use them to your long term strategic advantage. Google likes authoritative, informational, high traffic websites and rewards them with organic search placement, but it is still important to keep a careful eye on your bounce rate just to make sure important pages aren’t slipping into irrelevancy.

Google Search Goes to Secure Encryption Causing SEO Headaches

Google announced this past week that for all signed in users it will now show search results with an https:// address. This means that if you are signed in to Google+, Gmail or any other Google Properties when you go to Google.com the page will default to https://www.Google.com.

So what you say, “no big deal”, well here’s the rest of the story…

“Today, a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query. (Technically speaking, the user’s browser passes this
information via the HTTP referrer field.) However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com.”

This is very important news for website owners who are using Google Analytics to track traffic on their website and for the SEO firms that you may employ who may be tracking keyword information. You can read the full article on the Google Webmaster blog.

The bottom-line is that Google is not going to show the search terms people used to find your website when doing organic searches. This information has been incredibly valuable. One, it let’s you know what keyword search activity has helped people to find you so you can build on these successes; two, it allows you to evaluate your current SEO strategy to adjust if needed; and three, it allows your Google AdWords account manager to harvest additional keywords to help your AdWords program perform better.

Google does go on to say that they are making the change to protect a user’s privacy but annoyingly enough they are showing the full data in Google AdWords accounts. As a result webmasters all around the world have gone crazy over this news. Here is a link to a site that has archived a few of the most interesting articles on this topic if you would like to read more.

More On High Bounce Rates

Since I wrote about watching your website with Google Analytics and monitoring your bounce rate there have been a few questions from readers and customers that I felt I needed to address.

First, Google Analytics gives you an overall website bounce rate as well as a bounce rate by page. The higher the number the less relevant your page content is to your readers’ search queries and for that matter to your main website theme.

What causes a high bounce rate?

There are a few factors that can bump up your bounce rate. They are:

  • Your site is attracting the wrong type of readers
  • Your site is not user friendly and needs improved navigation
  • Your website has a long page load time and visitors are not waiting and leaving
  • You may be driving poorly targeted pay per click traffic to your website

I’ve see a few instances recently where there is great informational content on a site, but the content is driving up the site’s overall bounce rate. I can think of an example on my own website. I provide how-to’s as a courtesy on Outlook, email signatures, and other questions and topics from my newsletters over the years that clients have repeatedly asked for help with. Although this content is not about my services or even what I provide, it is archived on my site. I frequently point clients to pages of this informational content when they ask for how to fix a computer or email issue. As a result, these pages have been widely linked to around the web, and they drive traffic to my site. However, they typically have a very high bounce rate as the readers are not interested in my services just the information or how to. This could be a good reason for a high bounce rate.

If Google starts penalizing me for this content, these pages will be the very first I will delete. You may have similar types of pages on your site. Now, if you don’t have pages like this, and all your pages are about your own services, then a careful review of my list above may help you to isolate the issue causing your own high bounce rate.

If it makes sense to your business, you want to lower your bounce rate when possible but without hurting your overall traffic or reason you have content in place. Think carefully about your own situation and what your needs are for traffic before you start deleting files or dropping content blocks. You want to build on the things you do right not screw things up for yourself.

Your Bounce Rate on Google Analytics

This past month if you are sharing your website statistical data with Google Analytics, they emailed you a very interesting aggregate report on bounce rates. Here is an executive snapshot:

 

Traffic Sources

Pages / Visit

Bounce Rate

Avg Time on Site

Direct 4.0
(-0.5)
47.2%
(-4.0%)
5:21
(-0:07)
Referral 5.0
(+0.1)
43.1%
(-1.1%)
6:36
(-1:48)
Organic
Search
4.9
(-0.1)
47.9%
(-1.1%)
4:43
(+0:06)
CPC
Search
5.6
(+0.0)
41.4
(-1.7%)
3:57(+0:07)

What is very interesting is the industry average of typical bounce rates in the report. If your site has a bounce rate higher than these, it is definitely time to review your website content or at least evaluate if you may have a potential problem to address.

Another interesting trend noted was the time on a typical website and bounce rate has decreased for websites on the average this past year.

“Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.”

11/1/09 – 2/1/10

11/1/10 – 2/1/11

Difference

Pages/Visit 4.9 4.5 -0.4
Bounce
Rate
48.2% 47.0% -1.2%
Avg
Time on Site
5:49 5:23 -0:26

If your site is not stacking up to these global aggregate averages it may be time to adjust your message, review the informational value that you provide to readers, and change your focus of being self centric to user centric in your content. In some cases you may have a high bounce rate that you do not need to be concerned with based on the pages involved. For example, I have some informational white papers on my website that have high bounce rates. These pages are really built to generate links and draw in traffic. The people that come to visit may never be interested in my services, but I still like having the information and helpful content there for readers for a big picture.

Some of you may be asking why should I care about bounce rate?

Well first the bounce rate is the percentage of readers that hit your page and then surf off immediately; meaning they did not find what they were looking for on your website. If you have a high bounce rate for cost per click advertising it means keywords need to be immediately reviewed and some potentially dropped. If you are not using pay per click but rather your bounce rate is high for organic searches it may be that you should rework content with new keywords that are more specific to the services that you are offering instead of general terms. Check first to see what pages are involved first don’t just start changing things.

What I personally found interesting was that we finally have some benchmarks to compare sites to for evaluation of health as industry averages. I am going to check out my website stats right now to see how I personally stack up, how about you?