Understanding Bounce Rates in Google Analytics

SEO Services

What is a Bounce Rate?

In a nutshell, a Bounce Rate is calculated on the number of visitors to a website who look at their landing page and leave

 

A high Bounce Rate is a bad thing then right?

OK, so a higher bounce rate is generally viewed as a bad thing, however there are circumstances where a visitor that only looks at the landing page and leaves can’t be categorised as a “bounce” so easily.

A good example of this would be an informational page. This page may offer the visitor everything they need to know on the landing page, therefore the analytics would class this as a “bounce”, but in reality, the success of this page would be measurable elsewhere i.e telephone calls received, email addresses collected and so on.

 

So what is a genuine bounce?

Nicole lands on a web page. Its old, out of date and she hates it. She jumps back to her search results within 5 seconds. These are the bounce rates that would concern us and should ring some alarms bells with you too.

Poor quality traffic?

If the marketing of your website and products are poorly targeted, it will more than likely result in higher bounce rates

A simple example of this would be to market a film to an English audience, but omit to tell the audience that the film is in fact in French. The targeted audience will result in traffic to the landing page, but because the marketing was poorly targeted, the result will be low quality traffic. The flip side of course would be to target a French speaking English audience. The visitor numbers may be lower, but better targeting will result in high quality visitors and therefore a lower bounce rate. Higher quality visitors will also result in higher conversion rates too, but that’s a conversation for another day!

Un-targeted visitors

There will of course be circumstances beyond your control and un-targeted visitors can seriously wobble your bounce rate results

Lets say a super model is used to promote a product. Visitors to that page may be admiring the model and not visiting your site for what you sell.
Isolating this traffic means you can ignore it when analysing your data.

 

Whaaaaaa??????

If this all sounds great but analysing Bounce Rates is a little outside your comfort zone, Digital Crate would be happy to chat with you about how to get the most out of your data.

To find out how Digital Crate can help you, please get in touch with us and we would happily discuss your requirements with you further.