Understanding your website’s bounce rate

With the social media sharing and smart SEO many users are landing directly on the blog posts and the product pages. Businesses therefore need to work on these first impressions at every entry point to their website to stop the user from reaching the back button. The two terms of exit rates and bounce rates at many times tend to give rise to confusion.

Bounce rate is used to describe the visitor percentage that visit a page but do not visit any other page in the site. It is used to measure and understand how effective the landing page is. The bounce rate is also connected to advertising campaigns and SEO. In some cases the page might be designed to provide the visitor with information and nothing else. In such cases the bounce rate will not be relevant.

Exit rate is the term used to describe the visitor percentage that leaves the website from a specific page. This percentage helps gauge the performance of particular pages of a website. A page which has a high bounce rate means it is making a bad initial impression on the visitors. As per expert web analytics anything less than 30% of bounce rate is good while a bounce rate over 60% indicates a problem.

Google Analytics is a great tool to keep a tab on the traffic statistics for your site. There is a section in the tool known as benchmarking which allows people to compare their website’s bounce rate with other sites in similar category and having same size. The statistics for the bounce rate of a website can vary depending upon the type of pages and sites you are measuring.

A blog which offers all the contents on the same page itself will have a higher bounce rate of visitors. Generally blogs have an average bounce rate of 80%. This and other statistics like the time visitors spend on the site and the quantity of comments will help understand the performance of the blog. Best standard however is measuring the bounce rate of the individual over the time parameter.