A high bounce rate makes you failure as a blogger. If your bounce rate isn’t low then it means nobody is enjoying your blog. They don’t like what they see and they are leaving in boredom and disgust. A high bounce rate is basically telling you that your blog sucks.
Is that true? No it isn’t.
Bounce rate is one of those website stats that bloggers latch onto early as a key indicator of their success. Often they do this without fully understanding what exactly the bounce rate means. In this post I’ll discuss bounce rate, how you should use it, and I’ll even share a technique that I used to lower my bounce rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is basically the percentage of visitors to your blog who view only one page before they leave.
As a formula it can be expressed as:
Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits
A visitor “bounces” by closing their browser, typing a new URL, clicking a link to another site, or by sitting idle long enough for their session to timeout.
Why You Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Bounce Rate
The trouble with bounce rate is that it doesn’t account for positive visitor behaviour. For example:
- A visitor who keeps your page open until the session times out, then keeps browsing your site, has counted as a bounce. I do this all the time when I leave a page open as I attend to other work. Tabbed browsers make this a very likely scenario for a lot of bounces.
- A visitor who clicks an outbound link on the first page of yours that they visit counts as a bounce. So if you linked out to a source and they follow your link, thats a bounce. If it was an affiliate link you’d be very happy about that, as it might convert into a commission for you.
- A visitor who arrives on a sales landing page and clicked “Buy Now”, that is also a bounce. The good kind of bounce, also known as a conversion.
How You Should Pay Attention to Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is still a very important metric to watch for your site. Just don’t freak out about it. Instead, you should use it in positive ways.
Watch Trends – Rather than obsess over your bounce rate at the present time, monitor the trends instead. If it is increasing is that because your content is not resonating with readers? Is it because you aren’t presenting related content to visitors to keep them on your site? Or is it because you have been doing affiliate promotions and more people are exiting via your affiliate links?
Watch Specific Pages – You can use bounce rate to monitor and optimize specific pages of your site. For example I overhauled my About page and the bounce rate dropped from 73% to just under 50%. Take a look at the bounce rates for your highest trafficked pages and see if you can improve them.
Separate Visitor Types – The browsing behaviour of a new visitor and a returning visitor will be different, depending on the nature of your site. Google Analytics lets you split out different segments of traffic so that you can focus on improvements for each type of visitor.
Separate Traffic Sources – Understanding the quality of traffic you’re getting from different sources is very important, because it helps you work out which sources to focus your promotional efforts on. For example, I can see in my stats that visitors from discussion forums and other blogs that I comment on have far lower bounce rates than those from Twitter.
A Tip for Lowering Bounce Rate
One of the things that a visitor will look at when they arrive on your blog post is when it was published. A lot of bloggers write “timeless” content that remains relevant and valuable for several years. But when a reader sees that it was written a long time ago they might instinctively think of it as old and no longer useful.
A few weeks ago I removed the time stamp from my single blog posts. I left them visible on the home page because I want new visitors to see how often the site is updated, but for individual posts they’ve been removed.
This change made an immediate improvement on my bounce rate. Older posts now bounce less and register more time on site than before I removed the time stamps.
So if you’re struggling to improve your bounce rate, think about removing the time stamps from your posts to see if that helps.
Image Credit: Flickr
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent article that demonstrates numbers don’t tell the whole story. I’m not much of a stat watcher overall, but the bounce rate is one of the stats I do check at least once a month. This gave me some fresh perspective. I’m fine with where it’s at overall, but I’m still contemplating taking the date stamp off those individual posts . . .
I’ve always thought that high bounce rate was a bad thing. Now I understand that it might not be. Thanks a lot for sharing this.
Is there such a thing as good bounce rate? If so, what are you satisfied with?
Its all subjective. I am aiming to get most of my visitors viewing more than one page, which would mean under 50% bounce rate. But that is going to be tough. As long as it keeps improving slowly I’ll be happy.
Big e-commerce sites expect much lower bounce rates, under 20% for example.
Couldn’t agree more.
I did a blog post similar to this. At the end of the day as long as you’re making money & conversions (things such as twitter follows, social bookmarking submissions), then the bounce rate can be 100% as long as I care.
Another thing that causes bounce rate is bots, that usually visit one or two pages for their site (how many 1.00 page & 0:00:00 time on site average do you have for keywords in Google Analytics? They’re bots).
Okay, Paul, I’m not going to freak out about my high bounce rate anymore :-0
You’re right, I’m going to think people are clicking on my links and that they are being converted.
As an aside, can you point us to how you can turn off the indivdual timestamp on single posts, but keep it on the main page? I have a lot of evergreen material that could use this tip.
Thanks,
Karen
Stay tuned, I’ll write my next post on how to remove the dates from posts since a few people want to know.
That is a nice perspective there about bounces. Yes, can you help us with how to remove that time stamp on individual posts? That would be great.
Hey Paul,
Really Great Post. I though high bounce rate was really a bad.
Thanks for sharing this great Post.
~Dev
If you were running an ecommerce store you’d have to suffer through a 70% bounce rate!
When I look at my stats in Google Analytics, I look at a segment that takes away all of my bounces. I then get a picture of what made people stay, instead of fretting over people who leave.
Great idea on the time stamp. Going to implement that suggestion now!
Very inspiring article, I had worries about my bounce rate myself once, currently not much worrying about my blog since other work has occurred but certainly a good way to look at bounce rate.
Awesome post on the bounce rate.
My increased recently, because I get stumbled-upon (hate that!).
The tip with removing the time stamp is ASS-kicking !
An old date scares people, even if your content is timeless. That’s the first step I will take …like now !