Bounce Rate Analytics: How To Measure, Assess, and Audit To Increase Conversions

Your bounce rate can be such a scary number, right?It’s common knowledge that a high bounce rate is bad, and a low rate is good.Every time you log into your Google Analytics account, it’s right there waiting for you. I understand the feeling when you see that number creeping up.

But the problem is that numbers can be misleading.After all, how high is too high, really?In this post, I’ll show you how to fully measure and assess your bounce rate. That way, you’ll know if it’s actually too high for your industry or if it’s perfectly normal. I’ll share tips and tricks on how to audit your bounce rate and understand what’s driving it up.I’ll also tell you some of my secrets for lowering your bounce rate. But first, let’s talk about exactly what a bounce rate is and why you should care.

What is a Bounce Rate and Why Does it Matter?

A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off of your site.By default, Google Analytics considers a visitor to have interacted with your site if they visited at least one additional page.

The bounce rate you see in your overview report on Google Analytics is your site-wide bounce rate. It’s the average number of bounces across all of your pages divided by the total number of visits across all of those pages within the same period. You can also track the bounce rate of a single page or a segment or section of your site. I’ll show you how once we start looking at the different segment reports.

The bounce rate of a single page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the total number of bounces divided by the total number of visits on a page. Inspired by common questions that we’ve heard, this infographic provides answers to the most asked questions about bounce rate and provides tips to help you improve your bounce rate.

If you run an e-commerce site with a blog, you may want to implement a segmented bounce rate.Why? Your blog posts may have a very different average bounce rate than your product pages. We’ll get into the exact details later, but segmenting the two can make your numbers more meaningful when you’re looking at the data. So, why is bounce rate important? According to SEMrush, bounce rate is the 4th most important ranking factor on SERPs.

Can they both be right?Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Google’s algorithm may not directly take bounce rate into account, but what it signifies is very important to it. As of 2016, RankBrain was the third-most important ranking factor of Google’s algorithm.If you’re not familiar with RankBrain, its main purpose is to improve users’ search results by better understanding their search intent. If a user clicks on your page and leaves without any interaction, that could signal to RankBrain that your site isn’t what they’re looking for.

It makes it look like your result doesn’t match the searcher intent well. As a result, RankBrain says, “Maybe this page shouldn’t be so high in the results.”Can you see how these connect?If you understand bounce rate properly, it can tell you if your marketing strategy is effective and if your visitors are engaging with your content. The key is to understand what your “target” is and break down your bounce rate in a way that provides meaning.

What is a Good Bounce Rate?

Many different variables determine what a “good” bounce rate is.Things like your business type, industry, country, and the types of devices your visitors are using all influence what a good average bounce rate would be for your site. For instance, Brafton found that the average bounce rate is 58.18%. However, their research shows that bounce rates are higher for B2B businesses than B2C businesses.

If you’re still unsure about the bounce rate you should be targeting, Google Analytics can help you figure it out.Google Analytics provides a quick visualization of the average bounce rate for what it believes is your industry. It does this by benchmarking.First, you need to set up benchmarking in Google Analytics. Under the admin section, click on “Account Settings” and then check the “Benchmarking” box…Read more..

Source: Bounce Rate Analytics: How to Measure, Assess, and Audit to Increase Conversions

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