Bounce Rate

During your discussions with Tentacle’s Glasgow based Data Analytics team, you will hear them discuss your Bounce Rate. So, what exactly is a Bounce Rate?

As the name suggests, it is a metric involving the number of visitors that leave your site without taking any action. This is usually presented as a percentage.

In some very rare cases, Bounce Rates are not important. For instance, if you have a standalone page where you are guiding visitors to take an offline action. Such as calling a number or visiting a premises.

However, for the majority of cases, a low Bounce Rate is important. Your site will be littered with CTAs that you will be hoping visitors will press. For instance, clicking on a link, filling out a form, or even adding an item to a basket.

In this case, a low Bounce Rate will indicate that your CTAs and your website are not convincing visitors to take the desired actions.

It should be noted that it is not normal to have a very low or a very high Bounce Rate. The average for any given website is around 45%. Typically, normal Bounce Rates will depend on a lot of factors such as your industry and where you generate your traffic from.

This last point is crucial when analysing your Bounce Rates. Let’s take two scenarios. Firstly, one where you have traffic coming from a targeted advertising campaign. The actual advert, whether that be text or video based, will have the same text that is shown on the page the visitor lands on. Typically, here you should expect a very low as the visitor is seeing content they were expecting to. Now lets take a scenario where you are getting traffic from a link with an ambiguous or misleading heading. For instance, offering a product you do not sell anymore or a price you do not sell for. As most visitors will be disappointed on arriving, then you should expect an abnormally high Bounce Rate.

 Bounce Rates are important because:

- High Bounce Rates means lots of visitors that did not convert.

- Google will be keeping an eye on your Bounce Rates which means it can affect your Google rankings.

- Seeing a high Bounce Rate is not the end of the world! In fact it helps you identify the pages you need to work on. It could be implementing better content or UX.

Tentacle recommends you ensure that your pages meet the expectations of your visitors to ensure low Bounce Rates. Oh, and make sure your designs are awesome!