What Should My Website's Bounce Rate Be

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

Bounce Rate, an online marketing jargon, is a parameter to analyze web traffic. It is defined as the percentage of visitors, who enter a particular website and leave it after viewing one page. A visitor has several options to bounce away form a website i.e. closing the tab or browser, clicking on an external link, typing a new URL or selecting the back button etc., and the aforementioned options are few amongst them. Whatever be the means to bounce away, a high Bounce Rate for your website is not a good indicator for your business.

Significance Of Bounce Rate

Conventionally, the first page of any website carries an introductory note, some general information with brief idea regarding the nature of business. You would certainly like the visitors the stick to your website and navigate further. However, if your website fails to retain the interest of the visitors, there is something wrong. Thus, a high Bounce Rate indicates the need of reforms so as to maintain a hold on the surfers. A low Bounce Rate is a sign that you and your website are proceeding in the right direction with high traffic that is eventually beneficial for your services, products and business.

Factors Affecting Bounce Rate

There may be a number of reasons why a visitor bounces away from a website from its first page. You must know these factors so that when you get your website reformed or redesigned, you are sure to get a low Bounce Rate in the future. The elements that annoy and distract the visitors on a website can be listed as follows:

• Popup adverts
• Distracting adverts
• Streaming Music
• Auto-starting Video
• Confusing Webpage
• External links
• Irrelevant Content
• Too long loading time of pages, etc.

Internet experts suggest the average Bounce Rate to be around 40 %. However, the exceptions are always there. Sometimes, the websites with high Bounce Rate also do very well. For example, the websites with only one page have 100% Bounce Rate. Similarly, the landing page of some websites may straight away urge an action and thus high Bounce Rate becomes insignificant for these websites.