Bounce Rate – Important Or Not

Bounce rate is one of those metrics that carries different weight depending on who you speak to and how it is defined. There are varying opinions as to what a “bounce” is but the definition we like to use is quite simple:

A visitor is said to bounce when they enter your site and leave without viewing any other pages of your site. The bounce rate represents the number of people who “bounce” as a percentage of the total traffic to a page or website.

Here at Converted we do take notice of bounce rates but as part of the bigger picture, particularly in our paid search campaigns as we don’t want to pay for traffic for visitors to simply leave without engaging with client websites, because this isn’t always good for ROI.

Notice I said it isn’t always a good thing because there are times when a customer may enter your site and find your phone number conveniently at the top of your page and call you up. In this case you can be fairly happy that the customer has found what they were looking for, highlighting the point that bounce rate needs to be looked at in conjunction with visitor source. Your high bounce rate may not be indicative of a problem but more that your visitors simply visit your site looking to give you a call.

Should You Lower Bounce Rates?

If you are finding that your bounce rates are high but your visitors are not taking desired actions then you should look at ways of promoting engagement on your site. However you need to consider that you can reduce bounce rates without actually adding any real value.

• Breaking what is a single landing page into two;
• Moving your key messages onto other pages to make users navigate into your site to complete something as simple as a newsletter sign up

These are just two of the many ways you can reduce bounce rates but they are just a “smoke and mirrors” trick that adds no value to your site and this shouldn’t form part of your on site optimisation strategy.

We run many campaigns for our clients and bounce rates vary across the spectrum, some are very low (10%) and some can be over 70%. We do get asked whether this is wasting money with visitors not necessarily finding what they want on a site.  At this point I’ll give an example of what we have learned:

Over a month a client of ours had around 5,000 visits to their site with a bounce rate of almost 50%. Online conversion rate was just 1% and this caused a little concern for our client but when we discussed phone sales conversion rate was more actually closer to 4% so the bounce rate wasn’t actually an issue because the majority of visitors were actually converting over the phone.

When to take notice of Bounce rate

Bounce rate shouldn’t be viewed as a standalone metric but when used with others it can be useful in judging the quality of traffic coming from various sources. You may find that the search engines are sending you visitors that just aren’t quite right for your products. However you may find that your prospects come from other sources after positive interactions.

When looking at bounce rate, remember to take note of the source/landing page combinations as it could be that your visitors are being sent straight to what they are looking for so have no need to engage further with your site.