Internet Marketing Metrics Bounce Rate

Internet Marketing Metrics chapter 2:

Bounce Rate:

Your bounce rate tells you what proportion of your traffic lands on your site and then immediately leaves.

This is a bounce and it basically means that although you have a visit, you aren’t engaging with that visitor and they aren’t stopping to read what you’ve created.

This is a good example of why visits don’t tell the whole story. If you have 1,000 daily visits with a 99% bounce rate, then that means that only 10 people are actually sticking around to read your site!

But bear in mind that a bounce rate still doesn’t tell the whole story.

That’s because a bounce rate isn’t based on the amount of time they spend on your site but rather their interaction.

So someone might bounce from your site after spending a while there – and this simply means that they didn’t click to read any of your other pages.

So even if you have a bounce rate at about 60%, that doesn’t necessarily mean that visitors aren’t reading your site – they may be reading the page but simply not feeling the need to read further.

If your ‘site’ is a one page sales script, then this won’t necessarily be a bad thing!

A good bounce rate is generally thought to be anything from 26%-60% and you can consider anything under 30% to be very much in the ‘outstanding’ category.

Being around 40% is very average and shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

If you’re about 55%, then you’re getting into the higher portion but again, this is only a cause for concern depending on the type of site that you are running.

Finally, if you have a bounce rate over 70%, then that is considered poor/disappointing regardless of the nature of your website or blog.

As a general rule, your bounce rate is arguably more important than your visits because it tells you about engagement and what percentage of your traffic is likely to come back, is likely to buy from you and is likely to become a ‘fan’.

A similar metric to this is your ‘average time on site’.