What is bounce rate? How much is good and how to optimize bounce rate effectively

One of the familiar indicators that shows users have a good experience on the website is Bounce Rate. Many SEOers misunderstand this indicator, leading to time-consuming and money-wasting for businesses and organizations. 



1. What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the exit rate of visitors on your website. This is an important indicator in website analysis. It is used to measure the rate of users leaving the website after viewing only one page without performing any other actions such as filling out a form, clicking on a link, or moving to another page.

How to calculate bounce rate for a website:

The indicators include:

• Bounce: Is the number of visits where users only visit one page on the website, then leave without taking any further action.
• For example: A user visits page A on your website and leaves without clicking any links, buttons, or going to another page.
• In Google Analytics (GA), each time a visit has only one GIF request sent to GA, it will be counted as a “Bounce.”
• Entrance: The total number of times a user has visited your website. Each visit to the page from different sources (Google, ads, email…) will be counted as one “Entrance”.

For example, let's say you have a website in the travel niche and over the past week , the following data was recorded:

• Total number of visits (entrances): 2,000.
• Total bounces: 400.

We have: Bounce Rate = 400/2000 x 100 = 20%

So, your website's Bounce Rate last week was 20%.

2. How is Bounce Rate different from Exit Rate?

Confusion between Bounce rate and Exit rate often occurs among new SEOers. So how to distinguish between Exit rate and Bounce Rate?

Explain:

• Exit Rate is the percentage of users who leave a website from webpages, meaning they exit at a certain page after visiting many different pages on the website.
• Exit Rate does not depend on how many pages a user views before exiting.

How to calculate Exit rate for a website:

Compare Bounce Rate and Exit Rate, what is the difference:

3. What is an effective bounce rate for a website?

The question many SEOers ask when learning about Bounce Rate is what bounce rate is good for the website.

3.1. What is a good bounce rate?

• There is no specific “Bounce rate” value that is good for all websites, as it depends on the purpose and type of website. Therefore, there is no specific answer to this question.
• A high Bounce Rate is not necessarily bad and vice versa. For example, a blog post that clearly answers a specific question is likely to have a high Bounce Rate, because the user got the information they needed and left immediately.

However, you can refer to some industry average bounce rate levels to evaluate your site's performance:

• Content websites: 40% – 60%
• Lead generation websites: 30% – 50%
• Blog posts: 70% – 90%
• Retail / e-commerce websites: 20% – 40%
• Service websites: 10% – 30%
• Landing pages: 70% – 90%

3.2. Ways to evaluate bounce rate

Because the effective bounce rate is not fixed and specific, to know whether your page bounce rate is good or not, you need to base on the criteria below:

• Compare to Similar Sites: Compare your site’s Bounce Rate to that of your competitors or similar sites in your industry. If your site has the lowest bounce rate among the sites, that may be a good sign for your exit rate.
• Analyze user behavior: Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to better understand why users leave so quickly. It could be that users are finding the answer they need easily from your content, causing them to leave quickly.
• Set specific goals: Set specific goals for each website or marketing campaign. Then, monitor the Bounce Rate to see if you are achieving those goals. If you are achieving your goals, the Bounce Rate is considered good and vice versa.
• Focus on user experience: Improve content, design, and page load speed to keep users on your site longer. This will improve your bounce rate.

4. Factors that affect bounce rate

To optimize bounce rate effectively, you will need to understand the factors that affect it. I have compiled 7 factors that can affect the Bounce Rate of a website.

4.1. Content quality

If SEOers wonder what the first factor that affects Bounce Rate is, it is definitely content quality. Duplication, ambiguity and lack of appeal will increase the bounce rate. Specifically:

4.2. Website design