Bounce Rate Statistics

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You may have heard the term 'bounce rate' bandied about by Web marketers, but do you know what to make of bounce rate statistics for your own website?

A bounce is when a visitor views just one page on your site before leaving, or when a visitor stays on your website for just a short time (usually less than five seconds). The bounce rate is the number of bounces as a proportion of the total number of visitors to your site. Bounce rates can be calculated for each page of your site too, and compared with the average bounce rate for the entire site.

What can I use my bounce rate statistics for?
Bounce rate statistics are often overlooked, but they can offer you an insight into visitor behaviour and point to ways in which you can retain visitors more effectively or increase the length of time visitors browse your site. With a Web statistics tool such as Google Analytics, you can:

• Compare bounce rates for each of your main traffic sources - Are some sources of traffic providing a higher quality of site visitor than others?
• Measure bounce rates for your advertising campaigns - A short visit is usually not a successful visit in terms of conversion to a lead or sale. Are all of your targeted keywords relevant? High visibility for irrelevant terms will result in a high bounce rate.
• Check bounce rates for your top performing pages - Are some pages great at attracting visitors but not-so-great at keeping them there? Find room for improvement in your calls to action and check that your pages are optimized for relevant keywords.

What is a 'good' bounce rate?
A bounce rate under 20% is excellent, although often difficult to achieve. Generally, try to aim for a bounce rate of between 21% and 35%.

Using one of the many available site statistics tools, it's easy to gather useful information on who is visiting your website, what they do while they're there and, importantly, how long visitors spend on your website. Once you know the average length of time each visitor spends looking at your site, you'll be able to introduce new features and fresh content - and then track how this affects visitor behaviour. Hopefully, visitors will stay longer and come back for more!

Making your website more sticky (meaning visitors spend longer on your site) can be simple:

• Ensure your site has good, easy-to-use navigation which leads from one page to another, clearly shows what else your site has to offer and keeps visitors clicking.
• Get your users involved with a forum for community discussion or a blog where your team can provide industry news and relevant tips, while also getting reader feedback.
• Remind visitors to bookmark your website with a bookmark button.
• Email a monthly newsletter to keep in touch with your customers, provide useful information and let your users know about any new features, products or services.
• Include useful, informative and readable content on your website - and update it regularly to keep your site fresh.

Usability - User Behaviour images from Flickr: LEDs, Clean Study Bag and Corporate.