How To Analyze Bounce Rate and Conversion with One Simple Chart
Derive meaningful insight about the overall effectiveness of your website by combining two common analytics data points:
- Bounce Rate: A measurement of visitor engagement on your site, while conversion rate is best thought of as defining buying potential. When you compare bounce rate against conversion rate, you expect to see an inverse relationship - as the bounce rate increases, conversion rate decreases.
- Conversion Rate: A conversion occurs when a visitor reaches a specified goal on your site. It's the percentage of visits which resulted in a conversion to at least one of your goals.
There are three kinds of goals for your site:
- URL Destination Goal is a page that visitors see once they have completed an activity (e.g. "Thank You for signing up” page).
- Time on Site Goal is a time threshold that you define. When a visitor spends more or less time on your site than the threshold you specify, a conversion is triggered.
- Pages-per-Visit Goal allows you to define a pages-viewed threshold. When a visitor views more pages --or fewer pages --than the threshold you've set, a conversion is triggered.
Putting it All Together
Step 1: Access and collect analytics data indicating Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate for your website.
Step 2: Chart your conversion rate (x-axis) and bounce rate (y-axis) for each goal on your site over a consistent time period.
Step 3: Analyze the data. The points that fall outside of the expected pattern will be your biggest opportunities. The pages that have a high bounce rate and a high conversion rate and those with a low bounce rate and low conversion rate are uncommon and deserve further examination. You might ask why you would need to examine a page with high bounce rate and high conversion since high conversion is what you want...if you can get a lower bounce rate, meaning more visitor engagement, chances are your conversions will be even higher. As a rule of thumb, a 50 percent bounce rate is average. If you surpass 60 percent, you should be concerned. If you’re in excess of 80 percent, you’ve got a major problem.
Comments
Hi Kyle, I think it would help if you actually added an example chart of this. Since it will help understand and support your text.
Great feedback…stay tuned! Chart on the way…
Good read - thanks for the straight forward insight. Based on what you said about bounce rates of 50% being average I was wondering if there is a good rule of thumb or benchmark ratio for bounce rate : unique visitors or bounce rate: page views?
Ex: a bounce rate of 25% / 10,000 visitors is good, etc
Or:
Is an approx. 1% overall bounce rate for 16k page views a good thing? My gut says yes but it also wants data for context.
Any reliable data (thinking proportions) would be helpful. Thanks so much.
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I think this is the most important metric today.
Perhaps more important than social media, not sure, but certainly more important than Page Rank, backlinks and other older metrics.