Bounce rate metric, how to reduce it?

Angela Martinez Aug 17, 2023 12:10:08 PM

Index Content

Within a website, one of the most important metrics to understand if your website is doing well or not is the bounce rate. At this point, there are thousands of websites on the internet that act as competition, so you have to take great care of the conversion of your site before users choose to use a different one. For these there are thousands of metrics, in this post we are going to tell you what one of the most important is, the bounce rate.

what is the bounce rate?

The importance of this metric is based on the fact that it offers you information about your website by providing you with information about the behaviour of the users. Specifically the interaction of these with the page. If the user bounces means that they leave the page without having interacted with it in any way. The goal of any website is that the users interact as much as possible with the page. Therefore, the bounce rate is something negative for any website.

how is the bounce rate calculated?

The formula to calculate the bounce rate is quite simple, simply divide the number of users who leave the page after only viewing the landing page, by the total number of users who have visited the website, multiplied by 100 (to obtain the percentage). If out of 100 users, 40 leave the website without interacting, we could say that the website has a bounce rate of 40%.

But when is a user bounce considered a bounce?

The most common are:

The user leaves the page because he/she has clicked on a link that leads to another one
Closes the web tab itself
Goes back in the browser and returns to the previous page.
They type in a new URL in the browser
It also counts as a bounce if the user stops interacting with the page because the session is cancelled due to inactivity

is bounce rate the same as abandonment rate?

They are usually considered synonyms most of the time, but they are not, which can lead to a bad analysis. It is true that they measure concepts that are very similar and confusion is normal. Let's see what each one measures to better understand the difference between the two:

Bounce rate

The bounce rate, as we have already said, measures the percentage of users who abandon the website before interacting with it.

Abandonment rate

On the other hand, we have the abandonment or exit rate, which, unlike the bounce rate, measures the percentage of users who leave the website after having interacted with it.

Taking this into account, we can observe that if the exit rates are high, it indicates that we have good results on our website, if we have 3 different pages within our website, and the first one has a higher exit rate than the others, it implies that they visit that page more than the others.

So, if the bounce rate indicates something negative?

what is an acceptable bounce rate?

This question cannot be answered in a generic way, as each website has different factors and achieves its objectives in a different way. An example to understand this: if within a website, in order for the user to achieve its objectives, he does not need to interact with the website, but, for example, to read something, the bounce rate would not make sense, it would be analysed by the time the user spends within the page.

If we take into account only the pages that need interaction for users to meet objectives, a performance marker to try to meet it is to have a bounce rate between 20% and 50%.

Knowing all this, let's move on to what we are interested in, which is to reduce or improve the bounce rate.

how to reduce the bounce rate of my website?

We are already clear about the concept of bounce rate, how to calculate it and what a normal bounce rate should be, so now we are going to carry out a list of tips to reduce the bounce rate of our website:

Improve the content
If you improve the content of your website, both visually and informationally, it is much more likely that users will find it attractive and will be interested enough to continue browsing and interacting with it. If you get users interested in your website, they will browse other sections and you will be more likely to convert them into customers. Creating a content strategy is a great way to ensure that users are interested and that your bounce rate is reduced.
Valuable content
It is not enough to improve your content by adding visual elements to your website and being consistent, you have to give the user exactly what they are looking for, if they have entered your website because they have seen an offer that you have a specific product at half price, it must be easy to find the product, and above all, that product has to exist, it cannot be a previous promotion or misleading advertising. Just as when your website is about information and the content of your post does not solve the doubt thrown in the title.
If a user enters your website looking for something specific and finds it easily and quickly, the mental image they have of your brand will improve dramatically.
Responsive design
The design of your website is very well worked and is visual for the computer, it is not enough, it will not help you to improve the user experience if that same page can not be used on mobile. Most users who receive web pages are from mobile phones, the bounce rate will be almost 100% if the design of your website is not adapted to the mobile format.
Keywords
To reduce the bounce rate you need to combine different tactics, it is not enough with just one of these points, but to be optimal in all of them, one of the most useful when optimising is to use keywords that are relevant, all within a quality content, as we have seen above. If we use the words that users are looking for, there will be many more users who end up on our page because they are really interested in interacting with it.
Speed
One of the main reasons why users abandon a website is the loading speed, if it takes too long to load your website, the user will not wait that long and will go in search of another page that also solves their doubts and does not make them wait.