One of the questions we get all the time from clients is “what is bounce rate?” The definition of what bounce rate is has changed over the years, but as Google Analytics is one of the leaders in providing analytics to websites around the world, it helps to look at their definition of what is bounce rate.

Per Google, bounce rate is the percentage of times a visit ends with only one page view, meaning they either will click the back button or they will close out their browser. This can be an indication of bad quality, but it can also be an indication of the type of content you have and your audience.

We typically like to see bounce rate between 30-50%. However, on our own site our bounce rate hovers between 75-80%. Does this mean our website is of poor quality and people are exiting in droves?

The answer is actually no

The reason our site has a very high bounce rate is simply due to the type of traffic we get on the site. The majority of our traffic comes from organic search and lands on blog pages that we have written to specifically target search traffic.

When people come onto the site and consume the content, they typically bounce away 75% of the time, but they actually stay for typically over four minutes. So while the bounce rate might be high, it doesn’t mean the quality is bad. If people are on the site for over two minutes they are actually consuming the content and moving onto other things.

However, the bounce rate can also mean low quality and technical problems, so it’s important to note if certain pages like your home page or ecommerce pages have a high bounce rate. In this example looking at our own site a bounce rate of 35% on the home page isn’t great, but it doesn’t indicate that things are wildly off as well.

Track Correctly

Last, but not least, you should ensure the configuration and what you are tracking is correct. We have seen a number of Google analytics configurations that are incorrect and causing the data to be either inflated or missing. So before people start to cry wolf over a high bounce rate, you should make sure the Google analytics code is setup correctly.