What is Bounce Rate and Why Should You Care?

Snapshot of Bounce Rate Demystified by KissMetrics

When a visitor to a website is not engaged or does not find the information they seek, they will leave the website and find another one that will help them with their needs.

This is why bounce rate is an important metric for any SEO strategy and it is one metric which online marketers should understand.  Knowing a website’s bounce rate helps the marketer to measure the degree of engagement on that site.  

Simply defined, bounce rate is a ratio metric that shows the percentage of sessions on a website with only one page view.

Imagine a website has 100,000 visits, or sessions.  Of those visits, 30,000 visitors decide to click on one or more links within the website after they reached the landing page.  The other 70,000 visitors decide not to click any links from the landing page, and they eventually leave the website.

Those 70,000 visitors that did not click on any links represent the number of bounces from the website.  To get the bounce rate, one would need to divide the number of bounces by the number of visits.  Therefore, the bounce rate of the website is 70 percent.

The same calculation can be done for individual landing pages within a website in order to determine the bounce rate for those pages.

Tops Products, an e-commerce website that offers various office supplies, analyzed bounce rate to increase conversions on their website.

The company created a partnership with an automobile website that included multiple links to Tops Products’ bill of sale form.  The idea behind the referring URL was to get the visitors from the automobile site to purchase the bill of sale form from Tops Products’ site.

According to Jennifer Stagner, Tops Products’ technical support manager, the partnership was successful in substantially increasing traffic to their website.  However, despite this high inbound traffic count, Stagner noted the bounce rate was even higher.

For every 100 visitors clicking from the referring automobile website to Tops Products’ website, 82 visitors were immediately exiting the landing page.

Tops Products’ SEO team reviewed all ten of the referring links from the automobile website and was able to determine that the hyperlinks were directing visitors to a married living trust product instead of the bill of sale form.

To correct the links, the SEO team created 301 redirect links to reroute visitors to the intended product.  After a few weeks, Stagner reviewed Tops Products’ web analytics and noticed a dramatic, positive change.   There was a 39 percent bounce rate reduction and a 400 percent increase in conversation rates.

The Tops Products case study on bounce rate illustrates the importance of keeping track of this particular engagement metric.  Companies can create partnerships with other companies and drive traffic all day long to their own websites, but if visitors are not getting to the intended page, it can be detrimental for the SEO strategy.

Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist, recommends online marketers to measure bounce rate from their websites’ top referrers, as well as to measure the bounce rate for search keywords.  

In addition, it is also important to measure bounce rate for a websites’ top landing pages to be sure the content or call-to-action on that page synchronizes with the visitors’ needs.