Laura-Jane Koers
Laura-Jane specializes in web project management, information architecture design and information marketing. In 2011, she was nominated for an RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Award for her work with Brightflock. Laura-Jane holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Victoria.
Laura-Jane Koers's blog »What is a bounce rate? In layman's terms, a bounce rate is a measurement of whether visitors who arrive at your website actually stay to look around or whether they instantly hit the back button as soon as they get there.
You know what I mean:
Let's say you've done a Google search for something and you click through to a website from the Google search results page. You immediately make a snap judment about that site - "This website is too outdated." Or "This site looks like a scam." Or "I could never trust information from a website that looks like this." And you hit back right away. That's what I'm talking about when we say bounce rate.
Without going into the complexities of how this works, here's what you need to know. A high bounce rate is bad. A low bounce rate is good. Rule of thumb is that a bounce rate higher than 50% is bad and a bounce rate lower than 50% is good. (But there are exceptions - like if your site is news oriented and you haven't posted a new article some visitors may quickly hit your website to see if there's a new headline, then quickly leave if they don't see a new headline on your site. This is common for blogs.)
How can you find the bounce rate for your website? Don't worry, there's no math required. If you have Google Analytics website tracking on your site you can easily see bounce rate under the "Audience" tab. It's displayed in a percentage format.
The reason I'm thinking about bounce rate this morning is because we recently redesigned this raw food recipes website. We converted the site from a very home-made looking WordPress design to a more flexible Drupal website with a new design, as well.
I was very curious to see how the improved website design would help the bounce rate since I knew many potential customers weren't giving the website a chance because of how it looked. Sure enough, the bounce rate has improved by about 10%, which is a huge improvement for this site. This improvement will translate into more newsletter subscribers and more customers -- which finally connects to your return on investment. For example, if you're going to spend $5000 to overhaul your website, you should have some metrics in place to measure the return on investment.
Final words on bounce rate: It doesn't really matter what your bounce rate is and how it compares to other websites. But what is important is watching your own bounce rate over time. What is important is tracking your own website's performance and results -- and how those results change depending on the actions you take and the investments you make in your online business.
