The bounce rate of your site is one of the most important metrics to keep your eye on, but it’s often overlooked or misunderstood. So today I’m going to cover the three most common questions I get asked about bounce rate. For the purposes of this post I am going to concentrate on bounce rate on Google Analytics.

What does bounce rate measure?
Bounce rate measures how “sticky” your site is. If your bounce rate is 80%, it means that 80% of people who came to your site did not progress beyond the landing page. Web Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik most famously described bounce rate as “I came. I puked. I left.”

Google Analytics breaks down bounce rate into some useful statistics. You can view the bounce rate of:
1)Specific pages - to see how “sticky” those pages are
2)Keywords  - which you can further break down into paid and non-paid to tell how relevant they are to your site
3)Referring traffic – to assess which avenues bring in Quality traffic

Why is bounce rate important?
Bounce rate tells you whether your traffic is finding your site useful and relevant. This in turn lets you know whether you are targeting the right keywords, traffic and markets.

For example, if you are advertising using Paid Search, and are paying to have people click on your advert, you will want those people to stick around. If 80% of them are bouncing, you can assume that 80% of those people did not find your site relevant. That means you are wasting your money - and that’s never a good thing!

Bounce rate is also especially important when it comes to conversion optimisation - by reducing your bounce rate you increase the likelihood that people will convert on your site. After all, you have gone to all the effort of getting them there, surely you want them to stick around and signup for/buy/do/read something?

Credit: OddHarmonic

What is a good bounce rate?
My simplest answer would be - as low as possible! Bounce rate varies widely depending on the type of site you run and what you are trying to achieve.

If your site has a high bounce rate of 80%, work on getting it down to 75%, then 70% and so on. It’s highly unlikely that you will get your bounce rate into single figures, so don’t kill yourself trying - just try getting it as low as you can without sacrificing your traffic too much.

Sites where a high bounce rate would be expected include one page sites, sites which use AdSense (you ideally would want people to click on your adverts) and sites where the information the user is looking for is right there on the first page.

I hope those three questions give you a better idea about this really useful metric. Next week I’m going to discuss how to reduce your PPC bounce rate so that you don’t waste your budget.