A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off of your site.
A quick caveat – Bounce time is a hard metric to measure accurately – it needs a 2nd click (exit) to measure, but this crucial exist click is often missing from the equation because natural human behavouir is to just close the tab / browser, and this will be marked as a bounce.. even if your visitor spent 20mins reading your 3000 word masterpiece
What is an acceptable Bounce rate? This will vary across industries as per the infographic below using data collected by Customedialabs in 2016
Having a high bounce rate can mean three things:
- The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
- Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
- Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.