{"id":1162,"date":"2017-02-25T21:54:38","date_gmt":"2017-02-25T21:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1162"},"modified":"2017-02-25T21:55:24","modified_gmt":"2017-02-25T21:55:24","slug":"whats-a-good-bounce-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/02\/whats-a-good-bounce-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s a Good Bounce Rate?"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>

\"\"I\u2019ve had several chats recently with clients about bounce rates on their site. Some have said to me that they think they should be aiming for 65%, 45% or even 10% rates according to what they have read on the web.<\/p>\n

What all of these clients seem to have in common is that they don\u2019t understand what \u201cbounce rate\u201d measures.<\/p>\n

Technically, bounce rate measures the number of people that visit the site and leave without looking as another page on the site.<\/p>\n

\u2022 If you have 100 people visiting the site and 70 of them leave the site having looked at a single page you have a bounce rate of 70%;
\n\u2022 if only 33 of them leave without looking at a second page your bounce rate is 33% and so on.<\/p>\n

If you stop and think about that definition you will see that there can be many reasons why someone might only look at a single page on your site. These range from :<\/p>\n

\u2022 The page design is so horrible<\/a> that it puts people off ( for example the colours, text, effects etc);
\n\u2022 The content on the page doesn\u2019t match what the visitor is looking for and the navigation is too difficult to use (for example they are looking for information on a service that you provide such as bookkeeping and you\u2019ve got it on a page that\u2019s called compliance);
\n\u2022 The language on the page is too complex which puts people off. There are studies on the web that suggest you should be writing for people with a reading age of 9. Surprising, and some might say shockingly, this is the average reading age of the population. Although you might want to increase this a little depending on your audience;
\n\u2022 There’s too many spelling or grammatical errors<\/a> on your page (for example you use there instead of their, you\u2019re in stead of your, too instead of to, and the list goes on\u2026);
\n\u2022 The information that the visitor is looking for is on the page. Examples of this can be
\n\u2022 someone looking for your phone number or address (which is listed on your page) ;
\n\u2022 someone looking for a particular piece of information (for example we get many visitors to our \u201cwhat is DMOZ<\/a>\u201d page which explains about the subject);<\/p>\n

As you can see from the short list above there are some reasons why you should be concerned and other reasons why a high bounce rate is perfectly natural.<\/p>\n

One thing that you can do is not to look at the overall bounce rate for your site, but instead look at the rate for each page if it\u2019s available. You may find that your home page for example has a high bounce rate because it\u2019s just an image, or the image takes up too much of the screen, if that\u2019s the case maybe you need to look at adding some words to the page so that it doesn\u2019t leave people guessing what you do. However just looking at the bounce rate doesn\u2019t tell you much, to really work out what\u2019s happening you need to know what people were searching for when they found the page and to an extent how long people spent on the page (the \u201cdwell time\u201d). Taking the what is DMOZ page I mentioned above we know that many people that land on that page are looking for information about DMOZ, looking at the dwell time it falls just under 30 seconds suggesting that people are reading the entire page. The only problem with dwell time is that it doesn\u2019t prove that someone is actually reading the page, they may have landed on the page and then spent time drinking some coffee, having a chat or answering an email.<\/p>\n

Hopefully you can see that there are many reasons why using bounce rates as a measurement as how well your website is doing isn\u2019t as easy as you may have first thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>I\u2019ve had several chats recently with clients about bounce rates on their site. Some have said to me that they think they should be aiming for 65%, 45% or even 10% rates according to what they have read on the web. What all of these clients seem to have in common is that they don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-advice","category-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}