Whether running a website or an email marketing campaign, you must monitor your bounce rate. This is a critical metric both for your SEO and overall business success.
Let’s get right to it and define what bounce rate is. In the coming sections, you will also learn more about the importance of bounce rate as a metric in marketing and what strategies you can implement to reduce the bounce rate for your website and email bounce rate.
What Is Bounce Rate On a Website?
Bounce rate is a term for the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to browse the same site.
In this respect, bounce rate is a vital SEO parameter in web analytics. This useful metric enables you to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your website content and appeal, helping to make improvements for future website traffic.
Google Analytics defines bounce as a “single-page session on your site.” Bounce also entails that the user has not performed any action on the page during that session (e.g., clicking on a link).
Key Takeaways
A website bounce rate is the percentage of people who do not interact with your web page content before leaving;
While a “good” bounce rate depends on the type of website you own, keeping it as low as possible is always the end goal;
An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails an email server has not received.
How to Define Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a popular metric that is tracked to determine websites’ effectiveness at keeping visitors’ attention. The overall user experience significantly affects the likeliness of visitors interacting with the website content.
However, whether or not visitors will interact with your website content depends on the type of website you own and the content you produce. For example, if you run an online store, you would naturally aim for conversions. A high bounce rate would mean your visitors must do what you want them to do. If you run a single-page blog with no CTAs or links, this is instead a regular occurrence.
Understanding Bounce Rate Benchmarks
Bounce rates are a key metric for assessing the effectiveness of your website’s engagement and user experience. Knowing what constitutes a good bounce rate can help you evaluate your website’s performance more accurately.
What is a good bounce rate?
A “good” bounce rate means that your website has a low number of bounces. In other words, a small percentage of people leave your website without interacting with it.
On the other hand, a high bounce rate implies that most of your visitors leave your website without engaging with its content. This is a red flag for website owners and indicates something is wrong with their website.
It should now be clear that determining a reasonable bounce rate is complex. It depends on the type of your website and your business goals. A high bounce rate should only slightly alert blogs and content websites, but it should concern online stores and services.
While there is no definitive categorization of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bounce rate, it is important to compare your bounce rate with that of your competitors to avoid setting unrealistic expectations or deviating from industry norms.
Bounce rate benchmarks
For reference, here are some benchmark bounce rate averages across different types of websites:
- E-commerce and retail websites typically range from 20% to 45%.
- B2B websites range from 25% to 55%.
- Lead generation websites range from 30% to 55%.
- Non-ecommerce content websites range from 35% to 60%.
- Landing pages range from 60% to 90%.
- Dictionaries, portals, blogs, and news-oriented websites range from 65% to 90%.
What Are The Best Strategies to Reduce Bounce Rate?
No matter your website type, you will probably be concerned about your bounce rate. Here are a few things you can do to keep visitors browsing your website.
1. Attract the right visitors
People leaving your website might mean that your content could be better. Simply, you need to show it to those who want to see it. Fix this by choosing the keywords that best match your content and including the most relevant information in the metadata.
2. Optimize page loading time
Web pages that load slowly do not keep visitors. You want to make sure that all your pages’ content loads instantly. Otherwise, users will leave your site without seeing what you offer. Use Google Pagespeed Insights to analyze your website’s loading speed.
3. Improve your content
This does not mean the information you provide your readers has no value. It may be the case that your content is poorly written. It may not be optimized for web reading resulting in a poorer user experience. Your content should include headers, simple sentences, visuals, and large font, but more importantly, it should answer users’ questions.
4. Enhance mobile optimization
With a significant amount of web traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Use responsive design techniques to make sure your website looks and functions well on all devices. This includes optimizing images, buttons, and text for smaller screens and ensuring fast load times on mobile networks.
5. Utilize clear and engaging CTAs
Clear and engaging calls-to-action (CTAs) guide visitors to take the next step on your website, whether it’s reading another article, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. Make sure your CTAs are visible, concise, and compelling. Use action-oriented language and place them strategically throughout your content to encourage further engagement.
What Is Email Bounce Rate?
Email bounce occurs when the email server does not receive an email (i.e., when the server bounces an email). It refers to the percentage of non-delivered messages to the users from your email list.
There are hard and soft types of bounces in email marketing. A hard bounce may occur for several reasons. The email address might be incorrect, the domain is non-existent, or the email server has been set not to receive emails.
Hard bounces result from a permanent failure, and you should remove these emails from your email list.
Soft bounces indicate that the email has bounced after the server has received it. The user’s inbox may be full, or the content of the email might be too large. As a solution, the email service provider (ESP) will attempt to re-send the email in a few days. Still, if an email bounces repeatedly, you should remove that email address from your email list.
What Is a Good Email Bounce Rate?
Like with websites, a reasonable bounce rate is a low one. This is especially important in email marketing. Internet service providers allow for a limited amount of bounces and unsubscribers because they want to eradicate spam. Eventually, if you keep getting a lot of bounces, you might have your account suspended.
A good email bounce rate is anything below 2%.
Email bounce rates may vary from industry to industry, but this is a typical benchmark. Anything above 2% requires that you immediately resolve any potential issues.
How Can I Reduce The Email Bounce Rate?
To keep your emails flowing uninterruptedly into your customers’ inboxes, ensure that your users willingly give you their email addresses. Include a prompt on your website in which users manually type their email addresses if they wish to.
Moreover, it is best if they confirm their subscription through a confirmation email. On a side note, never include third-party emails. Not only will your email messages appear as spam, but reaching out to a totally unknown audience is a bad marketing practice.
Also, be consistent with your emails. This way, you can see which emails are not performing well. Also, you should update your email list more frequently. This will help you maintain a low number of email bounces.
Related Terms
Looking to enhance your understanding of website performance? Explore these related terms to gain deeper insights and improve your strategies.
Additional Tips & Tricks
- Your webpage’s bounce rate tends to be 32% higher if your page load time is up to 3 seconds;
- Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly;
- Do not include an excessive amount of pop-up ads and banners;
- Do not ask too much from your visitors immediately (e.g., their credit card number);
- Check your website for broken links and fix them. There may even be a bad inbound link that generates bounces. Contact the webmaster who put that link on their website and ask them to correct or remove it.
The Bottom Line
Bounce rate is a metric used to measure the quality of user engagement on a website. It is calculated by the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after only viewing one page. Bounce rate is an essential aspect of website performance as it reflects the ease of navigation and quality of content offered to visitors.
Whether you specialize in email marketing or web development, keep an eye on your bounce rate. Constantly updating your email lists and website content is indeed a tedious task. Nonetheless, these practices will help you maintain a good reputation and steady business growth.
Bounce Rate FAQs
The exit rate and bounce rate are not the same. Google Analytics provides some insights into the difference between bounce and exit rates. “Exit Rate is the percentage that was the last in the session”, while “Bounce Rate is the percentage that was the only one of the session”.
The overall user experience is a collection of factors that impact the likeliness of a user bouncing or sticking around on a web page. Implementing tactics to improve user experience is a common approach to reducing bounce rates.
The landing page is the first point of contact between users and your website. If the landing page does not convey a good first impression, a high bounce rate is to be expected.
Using Google Analytics is one of the most common ways to track bounce rate and website performance. Other analytics programs also do the job in slightly different ways. The most important thing is to apply improvements based on the analytics you gather.
