What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics & How Can You Solve It?

Everyone wants to know what bounce rate in Google analytics entails. It is well known that a low bounce rate is preferable to a high bounce rate. The statistics look at you every time you access your Google Analytics account, you might start to wonder what is wrong when you see that number start to rise.

The issue is that those figures might be deceptive. Let us be realistic. How high can a bounce rate be? There is so much involved in bounce rate, which requires much more than having foundational knowledge. Peradventure, you have an issue with your bounce rate, how do you resolve it?

This article will demonstrate how to calculate and evaluate your bounce rate accurately. That way, you will be able to determine whether it is genuinely too high or if it is right. Furthermore, we will explore how you can measure and analyze your bounce rate. As a bonus, you will learn techniques to reduce your bounce rate.

What is the bounce rate?

The percentage of visitors who arrive at your website and do nothing on the pages they enter is known as the “bounce rate.” These visitors could have clicked on a read more button or a menu item. This indicates that the visitor does not send a trigger to the Google Analytics server. 

The user bounces when there is no interaction with the homepage, and only one page is visited during the visit. You can use bounce rates to measure your audience or webpage quality. If your audience is of high quality, it means they are compatible with the goals of your website.

When we talk about bounce rates, people often confuse them with exit rates. These two are different from one another. The exit rate refers to the percentage of visitors that left your webpage from a particular page; however, it is not often the only one they have seen. It is possible that they visited many pages before the one they left. Because of this, exit rates are occasionally less concerning than bounce rates.

Bounce vs. Exit Rates 

Consider comparing the exit and bounce rates for a congratulatory page. A high bounce rate on the congratulatory page might be disturbing because it would imply that visitors were simply seeing it before leaving. Moreover, to make matters worse, they did not complete a form to access it, which means you are missing sales.

On the contrary, a high exit rate would not cause alarm. People leaving that page most likely arrived from its previous homepage, downloaded the deal on the congratulatory page, and then went to use the material they just downloaded. This would indicate that this page was the final in a series of visits.

Remember that this is a hypothetical situation; these conclusions may vary depending on other page metrics. Still, it provides a straightforward example of the distinction between exit and bounce rates. Hope you get the tricky difference between bounce and exit rates. 

Why do owners control website bounce rates?

Keep in mind that visitors to your website are probably fascinated by the services you have to provide. However, if they left immediately, it suggests you could not keep them interested. 

Because the user might turn to anyone else and earn money for them, it is a loss. Finally, a high bounce rate is a sign of a problem with your website. It may be anything, from bad content to a design problem.

How to Calculate bounce rate in Google Analytics?

From Google, you can calculate bounce rate in the following way – “Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.”

What this means is that it gathers and divides all sessions in which a user only visited one page.

Think about the following instance:

• John: He visits the “Homepage,” then “Category,” then “Product.”
• Mary: She visits the “Category” page, then “Homepage,” then the “Product” page
• Greg: He visits the “Homepage” and left

In this situation, the bounce rate for the “Homepage” is 50% since the Homepage has two views and one exit. However, Mary visited the Homepage, but this will not count during the bounce rate calculation since it is not a direct page visit.

How to interpret Bounce Rate in Google Analytics?

The page’s goal will determine how high your bounce rate is and if it is a good or bad thing. A high bounce rate is not necessarily alarming if the page’s only goal is to inform the audience. Of course, you want people to visit your website more often, sign up for your newsletter, and do other activities. 

However, it is understandable that individuals would close the tab after finishing reading if they had only visited the page to, for example, read a message, or get an address. Remember that even in this instance, no trigger is transmitted to the Google Analytics server; hence, the event is a bounce.

Making a segment that just contains “New visitors” on your blog is a smart move. Consider ways to increase new visitors’ engagement with your website if the bounce rate is high. You still want new users to interact with your website.

A high bounce rate is unfavorable if the goal of a page is to encourage users to interact with your website. Suppose you have a webpage encouraging visitors to sign up for your newsletter. You may be required to optimize the webpage itself if the bounce rate for that page is high. You may reduce that bounce rate by including a clear call-to-action, such as a “Subscribe to our newsletter” button.

Nevertheless, a high bounce rate on an email subscription page could also be due to other factors. If you entice visitors with misleading promises, you should not be shocked if they do not interact with your page. They presumably had different expectations when they arrived at your subscription page. 

The quality of the visitors, who may be highly motivated to sign up for the newsletter, rather than the page’s quality, may be shown by a low bounce rate if you were extremely clear from the beginning about what visitors may anticipate on the subscription page.

When is a bounce rate good?

If you have looked at your website’s bounce rate, you might be discouraged by the figure. However, you will undoubtedly feel much more disappointed if you try to target a 0% bounce rate. The ideal range for bounce rates is between 26% and 40%, with the average rate falling between 26% and 70%. 

Getting anything below 20% is typically rare, so you might want to check some things if that is what your data is saying. Duplicate code, improperly integrated tracking, and third-party add-ons might cause a bounce rate that is mistakenly reported.

The device the viewer is using might also affect the average bounce rate. For instance, 51% of mobile devices had the highest bounce rates across all industries. Comparatively, the average bounce rate for tablets and desktops is 45% and 43%, respectively. So, when assessing your website’s bounce rate, consider the visitors’ source.

In general, the bounce rate should be as low as possible. A high bounce rate is a sign that something is wrong with the page when you want users to engage with the website as a whole. Remember, you need to check your Google analytics dashboard for such information. Also, you can check on the Bing webmaster tool. It is better to use other digital marketing analytics tools like clarity, hotjar, and so on to track visitor’s activities on your site. What visitor’s do on your site & how they react, spending time on the site. And ultimately, you will be able to find out the proper causes of the bounce rate easily.

9 Ways on How to Reduce a Website Bounce Rate

What can you do with all you know about bounce rate? Generally, a page with a high bounce rate may be irrelevant or difficult for visitors to understand. However, you should not immediately take drastic measures like removing a page or starting a makeover. Before you decide which course of action to take, here are a few things to try.

Make your website mobile-friendly.

A little over half of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices. Therefore, creating a mobile-friendly experience is important and ensuring the experience is compelling. How frustrating is it to zoom in on a mobile website’s content after visiting a website? A responsive website is no longer enough; interaction with the mobile version must be intuitive and engaging.

One form of content that is particularly interesting is video. There may be a reason that four times as many people would prefer to see a video regarding a product than read about it. However, watching long videos on a mobile device consumes data, affecting the user experience and driving away visitors. 

Show Engaged Users Targeted Content

Recall that not all bounces are damaging. A reader may read your content, find what they were looking for, and then click away. For blog articles and resource sections, this is typical and quite common.

However, that does not increase your conversions or bounce rate. You want to present these visitors with the most reasonable offer in this situation. For instance, if a person accesses a blog content about cooking, your offer would be a cookbook rather than clothing.

You may display visitors tailored offers depending on the webpages they visit, the traffic source, and other factors. You can also designate that a campaign only appears for site visitors who have browsed a specific amount or stayed on the page for a certain period. By displaying tailored content, you can decrease your bounce rate, increase engagement, and increase conversions.

Increase Site Speed

Increasing your site’s speed is one of the simplest strategies to lower bounce rates. Users decide quickly whether to stay on a website in the first few seconds since they are in a rush. If it takes a while for your site to load, visitors may think it is broken or simply lose patience and leave.

Utilize resources like Google Page Speed and Pingdom to gauge the website speed. These programs can provide suggestions for improving your website speed.

You should leverage improved caching, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), optimized images, and think about changing to a faster-hosting company. Utilizing a CDN is one of the fastest and simplest ways to maintain your website speed. 

Use internal link properly

You desire a low bounce rate, right? Use a sophisticated internal linking technique. Use internal links to retain visitors to your website and encourage them to read more of your material. Do not make the mistake of linking each word in your content. 

Link to only websites that are useful to the page. If not, the page will appear disorganized and unprofessional. The best course of action is connecting to your topic articles. For instance, an SEO article should only link to articles that explore or describe SEO.

Get the attention of the reader

A flyout window is an excellent way to keep people on your website and lower the number of people who leave immediately. Many websites, especially news sites, use this method because it is a fantastic way to “invite” people to look at more pages on your site. There are many ways to use flyout windows. For example, you can use them on your site to get more people to sign up for your email list.

Provide easy navigational help

Even though the content on your page may be precisely what the visitor is seeking, if they must scroll down 80% of the page to get it, they are likely to leave.

Ensure your article swiftly gets straight to the point or responds to the inquiry. Consider including a table of contents or a button that skips to the most intriguing section if your blog post or website contains several sections.

For instance, many recipe blogs provide detailed descriptions of the recipe production process along with detailed pictures. Although many people merely need the recipe to cook from, some may find that information intriguing. 

Recipe bloggers frequently include a Click to Recipe button on all of their blogs. This enables the visitor who wants to cook something right away to reach the most beneficial section of the post.

Improve your call-to-action messaging

Every page on your website needs to have a purpose. One page’s objective might be to increase email subscribers, another might offer a product or service, and a blog post’s objective might be to send visitors to another page on your website.

The user should be made aware of that aim immediately, and one method to do this is to use different calls to action. This entails experimenting with various texts, colors, and placements until you discover what generates the most interactions.

Add a search bar

Users can find anything they need with the search bar. Make sure the search button is big and easy to see. Although longer queries can be entered even in small boxes, few people know this fact. The issue is that because of the height of the bar; users will not see the complete question. This can make it exceedingly challenging to review or edit the search.

Introducing a dynamic search bar that expands as one begins to text in the box is a smart solution to this issue. Making the bar sticky and fixing it at the top would be an excellent alternative to make it easier for people to locate. If no one can see the search bar, it serves no use.

Improve your content appearance 

A web page is no longer merely text on a page like it was in the 1990s. You must go beyond that in today’s world. Users dislike seeing random text on a page. Work on your page to demonstrate to users that you care. Use appropriate headings, graphics, short paragraphs, bold type, and italics to enhance your text’s appearance. This will improve readability, extend user engagement, and reduce Google analytics bounce rate.

Conversion and bounce rate

You can use bounce rate to measure your campaign success from a conversion standpoint. Consider changing the appearance of your page in the hopes that it will convert more effectively. In such a case, be careful to monitor the page bounce rate. If you are experiencing a rise in bounce rates, the design adjustment you made could have been incorrect and could account for your low conversion rate. 

From the standpoint of the traffic sources, there is another approach to view your bounce rate. What kind of traffic has the highest or lowest bounce rates? For instance, your newsletter? Or a website that refers to a lot of people? Can you identify the source of this bounce rate? 

Conclusion

Checking your bounce rate in Google Analytics allows you to analyze the impact of your online marketing. The bounce rate is a crucial statistic to consider when assessing the effectiveness of your website. 

Attempting to make your website more user-friendly for users by accurately detecting which webpages get a high bounce rate and implementing steps to minimize it provides several additional benefits.