A very common question we answer at our web design company is “What is a bounce rate?”
A simple question that is answered very simply, a bounce rate (BR) is terminology first brought to us by Google – you can see your bounce stats on your Google Analytics dashboard. This statistic represents the percentage of users that hit your home page and do not visit any other pages in your website.
Why do visitors leave before visiting any other pages? Many reasons, the page is taking too long to load, the content is poor, hit wrong website by mistake, the user needs a specific piece of info such as telephone number or address if they are on your home page. I have even seen a high bounce rate because every employee has the company home page set as the default page when a browser opens.
Who looks at your bounce rate? It is mainly search engines look at your BR to check if the users are getting the correct user experience from your site by judging you on your BR – the higher the BR the lower you quality score it. More importantly, you should be looking at it closely. If your bounce rate is 50% or more then the fact is 50% of higher of your visitors are not visiting other pages in your website. If it is the latter of the two mentioned above you can sort it fairly easily, if not then you need to investigate.