What is Bounce Rate?

In this series of Analytics posts, I’m examining Bounce rate. It’s an important measure for site managers because it explains the number of visitors who leave your site after landing on it. In plain English it’s about who doesn’t find anything interesting enough to make them stay.

Bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including:

  1. Hitting the back button on a web browser
  2. The user finished and closed a web browser window, ending the session
  3. The visitor clicks an ad on your website
  4. The visitor used the search box in their web browser
  5. The visitor typed a URL into their browser
  6. The visitor clicked a link to an external site, forcing them to leave your site

Bounce rates are calculated when a user takes any one of these actions before clicking on a second page of your site. So if a user clicked a second page before clicking on an advertisement then it would not be counted as a Bounce in your statistics.

Your site’s bounce rate can be calculated with the following formula:

Bounce = Visits that left after one page / Total number of visits

Website managers should aim to lower the bounce rate – as you do this it means you are engaging more of your visitors with your content and it’s an indicator that your content and design are correct, enticing people to click on more pages of your site each visit.

You can measure the bounce rate on your website using analytics tools like Google Analytics, which will automatically track these figures for you.

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