What is the Bounce rate?
The bounce rate is a figure used to analyze visitor traffic to a website. This rate indicates what percentage of the visits that enter our website leave without visiting other pages. With this, we can deduce that the user was not interested in the web, so he has decided not to invest more time in it.
The bounce takes place when the visitor “leaves” the website after a few seconds. That is, when the user has not visited any of the sections that we have. Normally, for a bounce to be considered, the visit time should be less than 30 seconds.
Measurement of bounce rate
It is very important to control the bounce rate of our website as it helps us to detect errors or aspects that need to be improved according to the time that visitors spend on the site. Therefore, it is recommended to analyse the bounce rate of the different pages of the website, as well as the bounce rate of internal links and third party links, or the bounce rate of blogs.
Do you want to know how to calculate it? The formula is: number of visitors visiting a single page of the website per browsing session, divided by the total number of visitors.
Importance of the bounce rate
This figure helps us to understand the impression visitors have of our website. For example, a high bounce rate can show that the users do not like the main design or content, that they have inadvertently reached the site and are not interested, or that the web takes too long to load, among other things.
For these reasons, analysing our bounce rate allows us to:
- Change the design and strategy of our website
- Detect new or existing user needs
- Improve our results: a high bounce rate means that the user does not visit more pages or take an interest in our products or services. If we make corrections accordingly, we will notice an improvement in the bounce rate and consequently, in sales and other types of conversions.
Although there is no exact figure and it depends a lot on the type of web (blog, landing page, E-commerce…) a reasonable bounce rate is always below 50%.
Tips for reducing the bounce rate
As we see, a high bounce rate is detrimental to the website and our business. So what should we do? Here are some tips:
- Make sure that pages load quickly and improve the technical aspects that are necessary. If the website takes a long time to load and is slow, the user will not take long to leave.
- Change the design to make it easier, agile and intuitive.
- Check the landing page, home page or main page to make sure it is clear and has the right menus.
- Incorporate attractive content in line with what the buyer is looking for, the person to whom we are addressing.
- Add links so that navigation leads to other internal pages of our site.
- Control the SEO and positioning of the page in Google.
- Add calls to action so that the user moves around the site and performs the actions we want to get.
Output rate vs bounce rate
Although it is often confused with the bounce rate, these are different email marketing metrics. The output rate shows us how many people are leaving the site from a certain page, even if this is not the first page visited on the web. If one of our pages has a high output rate, we need to investigate why, as this is a sign that something is wrong.
Bounce rate in email campaigns
Soft bounce and hard bounce measure the bounce rate in email marketing, i.e. the percentage of emails that bounce and do not reach their recipient out of the total number of emails sent.
There is a big difference between soft bounce and hard bounce. In the case of the first, it is simply a temporary error that prevents the receipt of the email. However, the hard bounce tells us that the message will never reach its recipient, so it is a permanent failure.