What is Bounce Rate?

February 23, 2012

in Webmaster World

Bounce RateWhat is bounce rate? Well let’s say 2 people came to your website and out of them 1 left without even clicking on any other link or page. This means your bounce rate is 50%. Bounce rate is defined as the rate at which the visitor leaves or bounces back from your link without visiting any other link on your page before the time out session usually expires.

- Bounce Rate Facts -

Though there is no fixed time out session, 30 minutes is taken as the standard. Generally, a visitor bounces by either closing the window or tab, going back to the previous page, typing a new URL in the address bar, or if the time out session expires.

The bounce rate for a single page is measured by the number of visitors who enter a page and leave in session time divided by the total number of people who entered the site at that time. A lower bounce rate means the site is popular and useful where as a higher bounce rate, is definitely not good and needs to be looked into. This means your visitors are not getting what they wanted.

A bounce that is lower than 30% is excellent. A strike around 50-60% is considered a thing of concern for bigger sites, and anything above 70% is something to worry about! Bounce rates can be reduced by providing the exact keywords that was provided in the ads to the landing pages.

How to reduce bounce rate is a question that should pop into the heads of all online business owners. The most important thing that should come here is what exactly are you providing your visitors? What is the targeted traffic given? What exactly are they looking for, is it properly getting displayed in search engines and are you providing the exact information promised in the ads or not?

The content in the landing page should be compelling enough for the visitor to click on some other links. The headlines to your article should contain the keywords that the visitor is using. The more it matches, the more its better. Reduce boredom. A visitor will never love to read monotonous long articles, use colors, bullets, use white space, and include ads, use images and graphics. That should attract attention.

Use RSS feeds; ask them for e mail based subscription, offer free brochures. The visitor should feel the site user friendly; steps to reach the next page should be easy and easily accessible.

YouTube related “Bounce Rate” video

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