Demystifying Bounce Rate

Time and again my clients ask me about Bounce Rate. This made me think that there is still confusion about what bounce rate and exit ratio are. The three main questions that have come up are

1. What is bounce rate?


2. What is the industry standard for bounce rate?


3. What causes high or low bounce rates?

   I am going to answer these questions in this post.
   
   What is bounce rate?
   
   Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site (or a page) and then leave immediately. Think of a ball (visitor) that is thrown (visits) towards a table (site). It hits the table and bounces back without rolling (visiting any other pages).
   
   Generally, “leave immediately” in the above definition means without going to any other page. However it could also be expressed in terms of time spent on site, say users who spend 5 seconds or less on the site irrespective of the number of pages they view.
   
   Bounce rates are calculated both at the individual page level and at the site level. For an individual page, bounce rate is the ratio of visitors who enter the site from that page and leave without going any deeper, to the total number of visitors who enter the site through that page. In other words it is single page visits/ total entries to the site through that page.
   At the site level, bounce rate is simply single page visits/total site visits.
   
   Note: If a visitor enters though a page, refreshes it (manually or via auto refresh such as ESPN score page or MSN money page) but never goes beyond the first page the visit is not counted in the bounce rate. The bounce rate is based on visits, not page views.

4. Bounce rate is often confused with Exit Ratio. Exit ratio is usually expressed as the percentage of exits from a page to the total number of visits to that page. As a side note: A lot of times exit ratio expressed as % of visits can be misleading. In most cases, page views are actually more appropriate than visits for this ratio. Why page views and not visits? If I view the same page twice during the same visit, and after one of those page views I exit, shouldn’t my exit ratio be 50% rather than 100%? The first view of this page was compelling enough for me to further engage. A 100% exit ratio would indicate a problem that may not be there.


5. Bounce rate is confused with Single Page Visit Ratio: Single page visit ratio is calculated as a percentage of single page visits over total visits to a page.

Here are two examples that will help you clarify

1. A visitor who enters site at home page and then goes to contact us page and leaves from contact us will be counted in the exit ratio from the contact us page but won’t be counted in the bounce rate of contact us page.


2. A visitor who enter the site from contact us page and then leaves without going any further counts in all three, exit ratio, single page visit ratio and bounce rate. So to Recap:
   
   Single Page Visit Ratio= Single Page Visits to the page/ Total Visits to the page
   
   Exit Ratio= Total Exists from the page/Total Visits on the page or Total Exits from the page/Total Page Views of the page (see explanation above)
   
   Bounce Rate= Single Page Visits to the page/Total Entries to the site through that page.
   Note: All of the above three are generally expressed as percentages.
   
   What is the industry standard for bounce rate?
   
   The simple and short answer is that there is no industry standard. I know you don’t want to hear that, but it is true. There is no industry standard. There are some ranges that I will share shortly but we can’t call them industry standards. There are a lot of factors that influence the bounce rate, so you really can’t compare bounce rates of one site (or page) to another. I have listed those in the next section.
   
   The goal of the site should generally be to reduce the bounce rate to as low as possible. The lower the bounce rate the better job the site is doing to keep users engaged. One exception may be a site that is intended to accomplish all relevant user engagement on it’s landing page. This is more common on say, a campaign landing page intended to sign up users for direct marketing emails.
   
   Bounce rate is very unique to your site and page. The best way to know if you are doing better or worse is to set your own baseline and compare your performance over time.
   
   I have seen most bounce rates fall between 18 – 30% on home page and the site overall. Any page with a bounce rate higher than 30% should be looked at closely. I am not saying that you should not analyze the pages below 30% bounce rate. Remember there is always room for incremental improvement.
   
   There are several factors that determine the actual bounce rate of any page.
   
   Here are some of the numbers that were listed by Steve Jackson based on his experience with various sites.
   
   Source: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2007/06/bounce_rate_sexiest_web_metric.html.
   
   Here are the other articles in the

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