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If you’re familiar with Google Analytics and website metrics, then you know that bounce rate is one of the more important stats you want to be tracking, and that it’s something you want to lower over time.
And if you’re not, then you might be wondering what bounce rate even is. Well, allow us to explain and advise you on ways to improve your website’s bounce rate:
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave a website without engaging with it, rather than clicking through to see more. In Google Analytics 4, Google defines bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions, the opposite of engagement rate (see Google’s help page on engagement rate and bounce rate).
The idea behind it is that if someone lands on a website and then closes it without doing anything else, it may mean that the website wasn’t helpful: the person didn’t find what they were looking for, or the content wasn’t quality, or it wasn’t relevant. None of these things help when it comes to getting your website to show up on Google. Because we all know that content is king, right?
Google wants to rank websites highly that provide quality content, bottom line. And if people are constantly bouncing from a website, then it indicates that perhaps the quality isn’t there.
Does bounce rate matter?
It does, mainly as a sign of how useful your pages are to visitors. Google doesn’t use your Google Analytics bounce rate to rank your website, but a high bounce rate often points to the same problems that hurt rankings and sales: slow pages, content that doesn’t match the search, or no clear next step.
What should your bounce rate be?
There is no exact number to aim for with your bounce rate, but in general: the lower the better.
A 2017 benchmark report from Brafton put the average bounce rate at about 58%, measured the old way in Universal Analytics. However, bounce rate varies across industries. For example, if a car website and a news website both have a bounce rate of 60%, it may be considered a good thing for one and a bad thing for the other.
It’s a good idea to segment before evaluating your website’s bounce rate, that is, break your site data down by age, gender, location, traffic source, etc, depending on who you actually want to target. This site details many different ways in which you can do this (under the ‘Modifying bounce rates’ section).
Source: DirectLync
How do you lower your bounce rate?
There are plenty of ways:
- Determine which pages of your site have the highest bounce rate and work on improving those (in Google Analytics 4, open Reports, then Engagement, then Landing page, and add bounce rate to the table)
- Speed up your website loading time
- Make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for (e.g. simplify your site structure, get rid of any distracting elements)
- Add internal links wherever relevant so that people can continue clicking through to read more on your website
- Add calls to action that prompt the user to click to another page on your site
- Use high quality images to attract and entice people
- Make it easy to read the text on your website (font size, font colour, language, sentence structure, clarity, etc)
Above all, make sure your website offers quality content. And if you still need help, our SEO team in Mildura can work on optimising your website for you.
