In this video, I’ll explain what is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics and What Is Considered a Good Bounce Rate.

So what is bounce rate?

This metric appears in many Google Analytics reports such as landing page report, which you can find under behavior and site content.

By default, bounce rate measures the percentage of users that land on a page, but don’t click on any of the links on the same site. So that means they bounced. For most pages, a high bounce rate is a bad thing.

Let me give you an example
Let’s say I come from google search to an article, I read the whole thing in 15 minutes but then I leave without clicking on any of the links. GA considers this as a bounce.

In the second example, I go to another website, and as soon as I land on the page, I click on the link in the navigation bar and go to another page on the same site.

But I leave the whole website in ten seconds. Google counts this as a non-bounced session as I visited another page on the same site.

I find bounce rate a pretty useless metric by itself. For example, if you compare the two examples I gave just now. It’s clear that the first example, where I spent fifteen minutes on the website is more valuable than, me leaving after ten seconds or so, although I clicked on something. So I advise combining bounce rate with for example average session duration.

As mentioned, by default, the bounce rate is only counted if the user doesn’t click on any internal links on the website. However, if you use Google Tag Manager, you can easily make any action on the website to be counted as non-bounce.
So for example, if someone stays on the website for more than five minutes, you could tell GA that this is a non-bounce session. But this is really up to you.

So now, you might be wondering, What Is then a Good Bounce Rate?

Well, it really depends on the type of page and what you have on the page.

For text-heavy articles, you can expect something between eight to ninety percent bounce rate.

You will see similar numbers for online marketing landing pages.

But if you have a well-linked article that guides the reader to other interesting content on your website, you can easily push that down to sixty to seventy percent.

On another hand, if your product listing pages have above 50% bounce rate, that’s pretty bad, because it means every second user comes to the page but doesn’t click on any of the products.

If you see a bounce rate of a hundred percent, and you have some traffic on the website. Then you probably have an issue with the tracking of Google Analytics.

The same thing goes if the bounce rate is near zero percent. Then you probably have GA tracking code twice on the site. Because you should always have some bounce rate.

And just in general a high bounce rate usually means that people don’t find the content interesting or useful.

But this is only the case if your average time on the page is also low. If you have a high bounce rate and high average time on the page.

Then your page is highly engaging, but it’s not linking to anything, so people are not continuing to browse your website after consuming the content.

Just keep in mind that bounce rate is a vanity metric, so it’s a metric that doesn’t directly add to your bottom-line nor does it tell you if the content was useful to the reader.

#google analytics #bounce rate