Bounce Rates

What Is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.

Bounce Rate is important for three main reasons:

1. Someone that bounces from your site (obviously) didn’t convert. So when you stop a visitor from bouncing, you can also increase your conversion rate.
2. Bounce Rate may be used as a Google Ranking factor. In fact, one industry study found that Bounce Rate was closely correlated to first page Google rankings.
3. A high Bounce Rate lets you know that your site (or specific pages on your site) has issues with content, user experience, page layout or copywriting.

What is a good bounce rate?

There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ bounce rate. With over four billion pages on the Internet, it is challenging to generalize for this metric, given the wide variety of website types and industries targeting a vast and diverse audience.

The definition of a “good” bounce rate is also subjective based on the type of page, and the source of traffic. For example, if you have an informational article that answers a specific question, and the primary source of traffic to the page is from organic search, the bounce rate of the page could be as high as 90%. This doesn’t mean that the page is necessarily a “bad bounce rate” even though it has a high bounce rate, it could just mean that the user found exactly what they were looking for, and no longer had any need to view any other pages. Conversely, a page with a low bounce rate may not necessarily be “good” if it has a poor user experience.

HubSpot has compiled a rough benchmark of bounce rates by industry that show the average bounce rate across different types of sites. Take these numbers with a grain of salt, but they could provide a rough guideline for gauging the performance of your pages: 40% – 60% content websites,  30% — 50% lead generation websites, 70% — 90% blog posts, 20% — 40% retail / e-commerce websites, 10% — 30% service websites,  70% — 90% landing pages

You can easily check a page’s bounce rate using our Traffic Analytics Tool, which also reveals a page’s average visit duration, page visits, and the total number of unique visitors.