Web analytics tools provide you with one of the most useful pieces of information you will receive about your website visitors: bounce rate. Simply put, bounce rate shows the number and percentage of viewers who arrive at a page on your website, then close it without clicking on any other pages within your site.

#1 Bounce Rate Myth

Having a high percentage or number of bounces doesn't always mean there is a problem. It is critical to keep things in perspective and to explore the reason why you end up with these results. Once you understand bounce rate, it helps you filter the problems you may be facing.

Keys to Understanding Bounce Rate:

• Staying idle on the page entered for a period of time (usually 30 minutes) without clicking on anything else before leaving registers as a bounce.
• Quality content that directly meets the expectations of your visitors without the need to navigate deeper may generate a bounce. (Which is good!)
• A bounce rate of 100% may seem alarming at first glance, but if there was only 1 visitor (meaning only 1 total bounce), then there is no cause for concern. However, a bounce rate of 100% with 100 visitors means there may be a problem in the site. Likewise, a bounce number of 100 isn't bad if you have 1,000 visitors access that page (meaning a bounce rate of only 10%).
• Traffic sources:
  • Understanding keywords and sites that refer visitors to your website will help uncover potential content misalignment
  • If a website includes a popular phrase, even as part of a blog, comment, or outside link, that page may appear in search results for that specific phrase. However, if the site's overall purpose isn't related to that phrase, visitors will likely bounce.
  • For example: someone enters "athlete Bobby Jones" into a search engine in hopes of finding information on a basketball player. The top link in the search results, however, is about a golfer. The person who clicks the first link will likely bounce right away. Another page in the search results featured a review of athletic shoes that included the original search phrase. Because the website was a retailer, the viewer will probably bounce since it doesn’t contain any real information about the basketball player.

Beyond the Bounce

After you have done research on your bounce rate and eliminated the factors that aren’t necessarily bad, you can focus on the bounces that are happening because of real problems. These might mean poor web design, lack of relevant content, broken links, etc. Now that you really understand bounce rate, I hope you can use this to maximize your website’s effectiveness.