Understanding Bounce Rate.

Have you ever wondered what Bounce Rate is?

Bounce Rate is an average of the number of total visits that only viewed one page of a website divided by the number of visits for the same given time period.

Bounce Rate = Total number of visits that only view one page / Total number of Visits.

Reasons why visitor may bounce by:

• Clicking on a link in your webpage that is for a different web site
• Closing an open window or tab in their browser
• Typing a new Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site from which they reached your site
• Session timeout (30min idle time is the norm)

What does it mean to me …

What does that mean to a website designer, developer, or owner of a website? Well the answer is that it really depends on your goals for the website.
Let’s say that your site is an informational site much like this site where people find information about specific topics, then a high bounce rate would be fairly acceptable. Why is that? Because, if a visitor finds the information needed from a landing page from a Google Search, then they would not have a need to click on another page or link in the site.
Now let’s say that your site is an e-commerce website and you have a high bounce rate. Well that is a serious problem because your site is not converting product searches into sales. There could be many reasons why conversions are not taking place and to name a few;

• Check your site for html errors. Nothing gives the shopper bad feelings about a site than broken links for product images or an SSL certificate that has expired.
• Visitors don’t understand how to add products to the shopping cart
• The product information is not displayed well or is hard to navigate
• Your landing pages have changes and links land on a poorly designed 404 page

The items above are just a small sample how a visitors experience can be translated into a high bounce rate.