In simpler terms, a bounce is a user that visits your site, then leaves before doing anything else. Bounce rate is the number of website visitors that bounce, divided by the number of total website visits.
That depends – if you have a specific page you want visitors to open, and don’t care if they interact with any other part of your website, then 100% bounce rate may be okay, right? Well, not so fast.
You have to consider session time. Session time is the amount of time someone spends on your website. Google begins counting session time the second a user lands on your website, and until they leave, OR until there is 30 minutes of inactivity. If you have 100% bounce rate and 0:00:00 average session time, these people are most likely hitting the back button before your page even loads.
You have to consider session time. Session time is the amount of time someone spends on your website. Google begins counting session time the second a user lands on your website, and until they leave, OR until there is 30 minutes of inactivity. If you have 100% bounce rate and 0:00:00 average session time, these people are most likely hitting the back button before your page even loads.
Using this table, you can easily see where your most valuable customers are coming from.
You may be asking yourself why would someone visit a page then immediately hit the back button or close the browser, ending the session – depends on a few factors. If you are running ads or putting links in an email about a specific offer or topic, and the page you are directing users to loads too slowly or does not match the ad closely, you can experience a high bounce rate with a low session time. This is not good.
A common mistake people often make is creating compelling and cool ads that get people to click, only to land them on a generic page that requires the user to go hunting around your website for the information or offer that was in your ad, which causes a high bounce rate and a low session time.
A second common mistake we see a lot are marketers running display ads, in an attempt to generate ecommerce transactions. While display ads may lead to a transaction, a display ad will have a much higher bounce rate than a search word ad. Display ads are presented to people who may, based on their profile, be interested in your offer, where search word ads are presented to people who are actively searching for your offer.
Display ads can be great for brand awareness while increasing transactions along the way. You may experience a 50% to 90% bounce rate. This is okay, if the session time is adequate. If session time is low and bounce rate is high, you could probably use your ad spend in other ways.
Having a landing page that matches the ad or link in an email as close as possible, even the same copy, engages people immediately for the reason they clicked. Having additional items on the topic or related to the topic for users to engage with, including articles, videos and photos on the page is a great way to get users to engage
A common mistake people often make is creating compelling and cool ads that get people to click, only to land them on a generic page that requires the user to go hunting around your website for the information or offer that was in your ad, which causes a high bounce rate and a low session time.
From Google: “A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.”
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