Why Measuring Bounce Rate Is Essential For Your Website
6:00 PMBounce Rate
Bounce Rate,
which falls under the engagement category, is defined as, “single page visits
divided by entry pages” (WVU, 2016) or the rate at which new visitors visit
your site and immediately click away without doing anything (Kissmetrics, 2010).
Bounce rate is often confused with the page exit metric, which is number of
exits from a page divided by total number of page views of that page (WVU,
2016). The main difference is that page exit ratio applies to all visits
regardless of length whereas bounce rate is determined based off of time spent
on a single page, group of pages, or site-wide (Digital Analytics Association,
2007). Avinash Kaushik said it best, bounce rate should be defined as, “I came;
I puked, and I left.”
To know if
the bounce rate on a website is good, it should be low. A lower bounce rate
indicates that visitors are spending a longer amount of time the page(s). According
to Kissmetrics (2010), a high bounce rate can mean several things, including
weak or irrelevant sources of traffic and landing pages that aren’t optimized
for conversion (have a poor design, low usability or high load times). However,
a high bounce rate may also mean that users have found the information that
they are looking for and left the site. Also, if a website consists of only one
page, this may be the reason for a high bounce rate as most analytic services
do not register multiple pageviews unless users reload that page (Google,
2016). Blogs also see a higher bounce rate since visitors generally come to read
the single article and then leave the website as there is no need to browse any
further (Sharma, 2015).
Yes, this is
the same graphic as above, but it is important to see how analytics can sort of
tell a story and integrate with each other to develop and help guide the
customer journey. As seen above, the returning visitors have a substantially
lower bounce rate. However, the new visitors have a pretty high bounce rate of
66.44% and only spend about six and a half minutes on the pages on average. If
a business wanted to gain new customers, one way they could do this is to see
how the returning visitors are engaging on the website. For example, what are
they landing on when visiting the site? Is this something that should be the
landing page for the new visitors? Segmenting the data to determine why
specific audiences have a high bounce rate would be very beneficial for a business.
For example, maybe the new visitors are using other mediums such as mobile
whereas returning visitors are more likely to visit on desktop. This sort of
information could mean that maybe the mobile website is not user-friendly or optimized
for mobile.
Analytics tell a
story about how customers engage with the business. It’s essential to analyze
all important data based on pre-determined goals to have a successful website.
References
Reed College of Media (2016). Week 1
lesson: Intro to web analytics and the basics of web analytics. West Virginia University. Retrieved from
https://ecampus.wvu.edu/
Cheng, R. (2015). How loyal are your
customers? This metric has the answer. Contently.
Retrieved from https://contently.com/strategist/2015/08/18/how-loyal-are-your-customers-this-metric-has-the-answer/
Mostyn, S. (2015). Google analytics:
7 important audience metrics to track. Practical
eCommerce. Retrieved from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/116726-google-analytics-7-important-audience-metrics-to-track
Sharma, H. (2015). Understanding
users in google analytics. Optimize
Smart. Retrieved from https://www.optimizesmart.com/understanding-users-in-google-analytics/
Kissmetrics. (2015). The 8 most important
conversion metrics you should be tracking. Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-8-most-important-conversion-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/
Digital Analytics Association.
(2007). Web analytics definitions. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf
Google. (2016). Bounce rate.
Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en
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