Understanding the Bounce Rate of a Website

If you own a website, you must track the traffic, visitor sources, average time on the site and most importantly the bounce rate. The bounce rate shows you the percentage of people "bouncing" off the site, which means leaving the page of your website that they landed on, without continuing to view further pages. Now, this can happen out of many reasons. The most common reasons are either your site looks bad and the visitor has no interest in looking any further or they simply find the site not relevant to what they were looking for. What is an acceptable bounce rate? Well, this depends how you are marketing the site. In general, a bounce rate below 20% is pretty good and having a bounce rate by 30% is acceptable. If your traffic is free, meaning the visitors are coming from organic searches or other interested websites, then you can even be happy with a 40% bounce rate. But if you are paying for your advertising, you want to make sure your bounce rate stays below 40%, or else you could say that 40% of your money is going out of the window, especially if you pay-per-click. A high bounce rate is also being viewed by the search engines. If you happen to rank first page for your keyword and over 40% are bouncing off your site, obviously you are not meeting the search engine standards and you will loose the rankings. There are many reasons you want to keep your site neat and on topic, so make sure you keep track of our analytics. Find out more about good web design to reduce your bounce rate.