Essentee Blog
Web design and management articles, guides and even the occasional rant.
What are bounce rates and how do I reduce them?
Your website's 'bounce rate' relates to the percentage of visitors that hit your website (or a page) and do not visit any other page. So it's a single-page visit.
This is an indication of the quality of your content and how well it matches what your visitors were looking for.
Because of the way people surf for information, it's hard to get a bounce rate much below 20%.
- Anything under 30% we don't worry much about.
- Anything over 40% we'd look at to check that it's reasonable that visitors go to that page and away again.
- Anything over 60% is cause for concern, so we'd check these pages and see if we can improve them
What do I do about high bounce rates?
To reduce bounce rates, it's more useful to look at individual pages rather than the whole site
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Check the search keywords used that landed people on the page, then see if the content on the page spoke to the need expressed in the search phrase.
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Check the content on the page to see if there is a clear, strong call to action
What are exit rates?
The percentage of visitors that leave your site from a given page, based on the number of visits to that page. A visitor who exits from a page might have visited other pages on your site, but just exited on that specific page.
Think about what the preferred path through your site is and whether the exit page is where you want people to be leaving from (like the order or registration confirmation page).
If visitors are exiting on pages that are half way through your sales funnel or in other words at a point that they are unlikely to have taken an action, it would pay you to review these pages and see if there is opportunity for improvement (similar to reducing bounce rates)
How can I have 100% bounce rate with 20% exit rate?
Bounce rates indicate a single-page visits. Exit rates indicate multi-page visits. But in some ways a percentage is misleading because it doesn't tell you the actual numbers. For those pages with 100% bounce rates, Google Analytics will tell you how many visits this was by looking at the Top Landing Page report.
