What Should Your Bounce Rate Be? Part One

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Before the advent of more than 50% of searches done in the mobile arena, a website wanted to strive for about a 45 to 50% bounce rate. Now with “in the moment” searches done on mobile accounting for more than half of all Google search traffic, the time on a website is dropping fast and bounce rates increasing.

When I do a survey of a number of website we access here is a quick synopsis of bounce rates we are seeing.

e-Commerce Store 73.94%
Home Service Provider 75.48%
Software and Security 65.62%
Architectural Features 95.80%
Home Service Provider 62.26%
Real Estate Services 41.68%
Industrial Product 74.58%
Home Services Provider 75.80%
Aviation Industry 69.44%
Electrical Service 67.32%
Home Services 58.69%
Healthcare 69.13%
SEO Services 77.63%
Landscape Services 66.29%
Cosmetic Services 72.48%

The site average is 69.74% this is significantly higher than the benchmark of 46.9% that Google Analytics had shared three years ago as a global benchmark. Now it is not uncommon for sites with strong informational content and a blog to have a 70% plus bounce rate.

In fact the sites in our list that have low bounce rates also typically those that have lower traffic and do not have additional  informational content on their site. They are mainly brochure-type websites focused on showcasing only their own services and do not typically have a blog.

So what do you do with this new normal of a relatively high bounce rate, and should you be concerned? Please come back to read the rest of this two part series on Wednesday.