Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:09 pm

This blog article has been triggered by a question on a group I belong to on LinkedIn that read “Will anyone suggest me how to reduce bounce rate of website as traffic is increasing day by day?” (sic).

I thought that I’d spend a few minutes putting together my response to the question in an attempt to help small businesses out there that may have been told that their “bounce rate” is too high and that they should reduce it.

First of all though, what is meant by the term “bounce rate”?  Put very simply the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site that arrive on a page (the landing page) and leave your site from the same page without looking at any other page on your web site.

There are several views about bounce rates ranging from Google’s “Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” (http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986) to the view that you have to look at each page in turn and work out what the purpose of that page is before you can worry about the bounce rate.

You may be thinking at this point “why should I look at each page?” and I’d like to answer this using a few examples – see if you can work out what type of bounce rate you would expect for each type of page listed below (high, medium, low), I’ll give my answers after the list of pages, along with my reasoning.

1. Home page of a site that says a little about your business and has links to other pages which list your services or products.
2. Product level page on an e-commerce site, listing details of the product and an option to add the product to your shopping cart
3. A page that lists all your contact details including email address, phone number and “bricks ‘n mortar’ address
4. A page on your site that has a review for a product and then has a link to another site where the visitor can buy the product, you earn money for each and every sale that you send to the 2nd site (an affiliate link)
5. A page on an artists/photographers site that contains their biography or an “about us” page on a business website.
6. A page that contains a form that allows people to sign up for your newsletter.
7. A page that lists details of services that you provide and has clear contact details on the page (email address and phone number for example).

As you can see, all of these are typical pages that you might find on any website and this is where measuring bounce rate on your website becomes interesting and difficult unless you look at each of the pages the purpose of that page.  My expected rates are listed below (along with the reasoning behind my expectations) :-

1. I would be looking for a low rate on a page like this.  Ideally you want people to click the links and look at other pages on your site.
2. Again, I would be hoping for a low bounce rate on this type of page as you want people to click on an “add to cart” link (and then eventually go to the checkout page).
3. For a page like this I’d be happy with a high level of bounces as the visitor has all your contact details (which is presumably what they were looking for if they landed on this page).  Of course I would be hoping that they then emailed or picked up the phone (or even visited the office/shop) but you can’t measure this as part of the bounce rate.
4. Ideally you want a high bounce rate for this type of page (as long as the visitor used to the affiliate link to buy the product/service) that you are reviewing.  After all the page’s purpose is to attract people into in and then get them to leave via the link so that you can earn money.  Having said that if you are using a tool such as Google Analytics you can set up the affiliate link in a way so that the click is counted and thus reduces the bounce rate calculation
5. On this type of page (as any “about us” type of page) you would be hoping for a low bounce rate as you want the visitor to look elsewhere on the site – of course, if the page also contains contact details then you might be happy with a medium level of bounces as long as the visitors contact you).
6. This is a more complex one – if your email capture form takes the visitor to a “thanks for signing up” page then you want a low bounce rate.  However I’ve seen these kinds of forms where you seem to end up in a blind ally once you have filled in the form so this would probably indicate a high level of bounces.  Personally though I would always send the visitor to a “thanks” page so that they know that the form contents have been processed (so a low rate).
7. If the visitor has come in to your site looking for  (for example) someone to fill in their tax form and your page tells them all about how this is something you are an expert in then you might be looking for a high – medium bounce rate, especially if your contact details are on the page.  Of course, you need to measure the source of enquiries made by phone or email to see if people have found you via that page.

Did your ideas about the level of bouncing visitors match up to my expectations on the different types of pages?  I’d be interested to hear from you if you think differently, just fill in the comment form below and let me know.