The ROI Revolution Blog

February 6, 2007

It is easy to take certain words and phrases for granted until something happens to make you question it, kinda like this old joke back from 4th grade:

"(sniff) My nose is running."
"Oh, yeah? Where's it running TO? Haha!"

Ok, that was much funnier in the 4th grade, trust me. Anyways, another word that I have been taking for granted is 'bounce'. This was brought to my attention when several people who are enrolled in our Google Analytics Quick-Start Course asked us about 'bounce' and 'bounce rate'.

Wikipedia defines a bounce as occurring "when a website visitor immediately leaves a website after viewing only a single page...The Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visitors."

The Conversion Chronicles blog defines bounce rate as:

"A bounce rate or single page access is where someone arrives at your website (from whatever source) and then leaves without taking any action, be that clicking a link, buying a product, adding to the cart whatever. Nothing. They basically leave without doing anything, in other words they arrive and bounce away."

So lets look at this in a real-life situation. You want to place on order for a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to your sweetheart on Valentine's Day, so you hop online and type in "Flowers". The first search result looks promising so you click on it. Once you arrive at the site, you see that these flowers are potted plants instead of cut flower bouquets, so without going any further into the site you hit the back button on your browser and start checking out the other search results. That is a bounce for the website you just checked out with the potted plants.

Obviously you want to have a low number of bounces on your site and landing pages, especially if you are using something like PPC advertising. You don't want to pay for a click that doesn't go anywhere.

The Conversion Chronicles blog also gives some loose guide-lines based on their experiences:

Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce.

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I've seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale, high ticket products) 30-50%.

The Conversion Chronicles blog follows up this list with a great warning that I'd like to repeat here:

"We advise that when forming a benchmark, that you do it internally. Take the average bounce rate over a given period on your current site. You need to have at least 1000 entries coming from normal sources to get reasonably actionable data. Measure what the average bounce rate is and then work to get that down."

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