What is a good bounce rate for Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help us understand our website visitors. But, many people who access this information miss the most important numbers. At the end of the day, we all have the same goal in mind, conversions. Whether we are converting visitors into direct customers through an ecommerce portal, or we are converting visitors into leads via contact forms, the foundation is the same.

Analyzing and optimizing your bounce rate is a great way to understand users on your site and to convert them. To decide what a good bounce rate is, we must first investigate what is the bounce rate in Google Analytics and how is it calculated.

What is bounce rate?

As explained by Google, bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits before clicking away from your site. These single page clicks can be on your main homepage or directly to an interior page such as the about us page.

As for the way analytics calculates the bounce rate, it’s very simple. If 100 users visit your site and 35 of those users click away after visiting that single page, your bounce rate will be 35%. Ultimately, the lower the bounce rate, the better…. unless your bounce rate is 0%, at that point the analytics script is probably broken.

What is a good bounce rate?

Now that we understand the foundation of what the bounce rate is and how it is calculated, we can figure out what a good bounce rate would be. In our experience we’ve noticed every bounce rate is dependent on a few factors:

1. Industry – believe it or not, your industry makes a difference on your user’s interaction. Some industries naturally promote digital user interaction, while others promote direct contact (this can be a simple phone call to someone stopping by a brick and mortar store).
2. Website Design – If users visit your site and are immediately turned off by the amount of content, the obvious age of the site, or lack of branding, they are more inclined to immediately click away.
3. External Ad Campaigns – this is very common with many people utilizing Google’s PPC campaigns and Facebook Ads. These are based on user defined variables such as geographical location, interests, search habits, etc. If a campaign is too broad or misleading, many users might mistakenly click an ad to your site and immediately click away as it wasn’t what they were looking for.

With the factors we’ve encountered above, a range that promotes a good bounce rate is 30%-40%. When a bounce rate is 40%-60% this would be considered average. While a poor bounce rate is anything above 60%.

No matter what your current bounce rate is, it’s important to have the drive to want to improve upon that. If your current bounce rate is considered poor it should be a primary focus for your online presence.

How to reduce my bounce rate?

1. Consistent Branding – First and foremost it’s important that your branding is consistent so that visitors immediately realize they are on the correct site.
2. Simple Navigation – User experience is vital this day in age. Visitors except to have a clean site that is easy to navigate. This way relevant content is available with minimal clicks no matter where they start.
3. Interlinking Content – As stated above, give the users the ability to find the content they are looking for, however interlink that content so it suggests user engagement to bring visitors elsewhere on your site.
4. Call to Action – A call to action button or form is always a fantastic way to engage your visitors. Make sure these call to actions are placed in a highly accessible location and are easy for the user to engage and complete. If you are using a contact form as a call to action, use only minimal fields to capture their information.

*Photo credit: http://www.splitshire.com