Bounce rate is a great way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. Why?
- It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool.
- It is easy to understand
- Hard to mis-understand
- Can be applied to any of your efforts.
- It is the #1 “quality of traffic” metric that every small (or large) website owner should understand and be tracking/improving.

What is A Bounce Rate?

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. Instantly usually means within 5 seconds and without going to another page on the same domain (site). Bounce rate is sometimes intermixed with exit rate or short visit rate. Bounce rate is the proper and more accurate term for this customer behavior.

Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.

It is usually measured in two ways:

* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

Either definition is fine, each has its own nuance. Please check what your tool’s definition is.

So how can you use it?

Start by measuring the bounce rate for your entire website. Any decent web analytics tool will give you this as soon as you log into it. You’ll understand better why your conversion rate is so low, if you have made changes over the last x amount of time then watching a trend of bounce rate is a sure way to know if the changes you are making are for the better.

Now you are ready to dive deeper.

#1: Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources.

Your goal is to figure out if some sources of traffic are sending you particularly terrible traffic compared to others. In your web analytics tool simply go to the Referring URL’s / Sites report and look at the bounce rate number. Which pages are doing the best (a low percent) on bounce rates which are the worst (highest percent)

Action: Do you need to revisit relationships with sites that are not sending you high quality traffic? What is the call to action that is causing people to come to your site and bounce? Are your email, affiliate, other marketing campaigns yielding low bounce rates? You get the idea.

#2: Measure bounce rate of your AdWords, AdCenter, YSM (PPC) campaigns.

This is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook. Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website!

If you have set-up your marketing campaigns properly (including Search PPC), you should be able to see bounce rates at the campaign level, publisher level (google, yahoo, msn), creative level (different pieces of copy) and keyword level.

Action: Look for keywords or creatives that are worse than average and try to find patterns and/or reasons why the numbers are worse. Stop bidding on those keywords, then do a deeper analysis of how good your landing pages are, and your other campaign attributes.

#3: Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages.

Now it is entire possible that your efforts are stellar (as they usually are) but it is your website that is letting you down. Looking at bounce rates by landing page/entry page will give an idea of which pages are rejecting visitors like “Off” does to mosquitos and which ones are working hard to bring that person into the company fold.

Action: Check to see if the right calls to action are on the page? Is the content optimally organized? If the above pages are your campaign (direct marketing or paid search campaigns) landing pages then are they delivering on the promise of the email piece you had sent out or the search keyword? Answer these questions and consider multivariate testing to improve page performance .

As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.