Most Marketers Are Misusing Bounce Rate — Here’s What You Need to Know

One of the questions I often get regarding my traffic reports is this:

“What’s the bounce rate on this traffic?”

I usually reply that this depends on so many factors that I can’t possibly give a concrete answer — and this is the best short answer I can provide.

But after receiving this question over and over again, I started thinking.

Why are marketers taking bounce rate as an ironclad metric determining whether something is good or not? Is this a good idea? And what is bounce rate really a measure of?

I’ll attempt to answer all of these questions below.

What is bounce rate a measure of?

Naturally, the first thing to investigate is what bounce rate really measures.

I will assume and use Google Analytics as the analytics tool for the rest of this post. In their own words:

“A bounce is a single-page session on your site.”

It’s a definition, but there’s another term that may not be completely clear in this statement, a session.

A session is, as the word suggests, a browsing session for a user. E.g., say I go visit your site and browse through a few pages and then leave.

That’s a session.

If I come back later I’ll start a new session. By default, the web session length in Google Analytics is 30 minutes of inactivity (meaning if I leave for more than 30 minutes and come back, that counts as a new session).

A good way to think of sessions is as a website visit — a user arrives, browses around a bit and at some point leaves your site again.

If your website had 30 sessions yesterday, it most likely means that you had 30 website visits. However, these visits may not be unique as one person could contribute several sessions in a day.

We now know what sessions are — back to bounce rates.

The bounce rate is computed as all single-page sessions (bounces) divided by all sessions.

Stated differently: it measures how many of your sessions are bounces.

E.g., say we have 100 people visit a page. 70 of them go on to visit another page on your site in the same session while the rest (30 people) leave before requesting any other page.

Your bounce rate for that page is 30 / 100 = 0.3. Your bounce rate is 30%.

To conclude, bounce rate for a page is a measure of how many people visit only this page without moving on to other pages on your site.

Is a high bounce rate bad?

This is where things get more interesting.

Generally, there’s no simple answer to this question — a good bounce rate for a page depends on what the page is meant to achieve.

First up, bounce rates are misunderstood and misused by a lot of marketers. Many take it as a simple success factor.

“The lower the bounce rate, the better I’m doing.”

This may be true for some pages, but there’s more to the equation than just lower is always better.

Blog post bounce rate example

Imagine this scenario:

A longtime follower receives your latest email newsletter that links to a blog post of yours. She reads the lengthy post and then shares it with her own followers and network.

That visit may count as a bounce if she didn’t visit other pages on your site.

But it’s not really a bad visit, is it?

It’s just that the page in question — the long-form blog post — wasn’t created to necessarily have a good bounce rate.

It wasn’t the goal of the blog post, and so it shouldn’t be used as a success measure for it.

That’s like measuring a professional marathon runner on how much he can lift in the gym — doesn’t make sense.

The blog post has other goals than just sending people to other pages on your site.

Other metrics to consider in that case could be time spent on page, or even custom metrics such as scroll depth using Google Tag Manager.

Sure, bounce rate does matter for blog posts too. Often, you want to use blog posts to guide people to landing pages, sales pages, or other articles.

But even in that case, if your products or landing pages are hosted on other domains or under another tracking system, they may still count as bounces in Google Analytics.

Where bounce rates really matter

Entry pages where people land on your site and continue to other pages are relying on good bounce rates.

Good examples are your website homepage and landing pages.

These are entry points to your website and not meant to be the only page viewed like a blog post could be.

The most important metric for a landing page is pretty much bounce rate. And the reason is that the goal of a landing page is to guide people to some other destination. E.g., an email sign up or a checkout page.

Same goes for your website homepage — its goal is to funnel people to other pages on your website.

How to use bounce rates properly

Bonce rates shouldn’t be used blindly.

Especially not if you are trying to compare different pages. E.g., this page has a 20% bounce rate and this other one has 30%, so something must be wrong with the 30% one.

Not necessarily.

The goals of these two pages could be completely different — and that’s key.

You should figure out what your page is trying to achieve before you decide to use bounce rate as a measure of its success.

Generally, landing pages and entry pages rely on good bounce rates. That’s their measure of success.

A blog post may try to achieve something completely different. Social shares? Time spent on site? Comments?

For a sales page, bounce rate could be used, but more important metrics such as customer value should be considered first.

Whatever it is, it’s important that you identify this before you start analyzing metrics.

Don’t blindly use to bounce rates as a measure of success.

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