High bounce rates imply that there’s a problem with your website – specifically with the user experience. Common sense says that if users come to your site and then turn around and leave, they don’t like your site.
According to Mashable, the average bounce rate is around 50%. That would mean that about half of website visitors leave the site without clicking anything else on the page.
Does this mean that people are unhappy with half the websites they visit?
Or could it possibly mean that half of the time that we visit websites, we get what we want out of them without needing to click anything else on the page? If that’s true, a high bounce rate could imply that a website is efficient.
Let’s look at a non-digital example. If I walk into your store and don’t buy something, does that mean there is something wrong with your store? Maybe I’m just browsing. Maybe I’m planning to come back later with my wife before making my purchase. Neither of these scenarios means that your store isn’t great. I just may not be ready to buy.
Couldn’t that be true online too?
Or consider this scenario. Maybe I went to your website to read about your business, saw what I needed to see, and decided on the spot to hire you. I pick up the phone, or visit your location without looking at any additional pages on your site.
And couldn’t this be even more true if I’m using a mobile device? Most of my website visits on my phone are brief. I need a phone number, or a physical address – both normally found on the home page. When I find them easily, I don’t need to click through the site.
And while I’m ranting, even though I have a nice smartphone, that screen is still too small to be surfing the web with my over-40-year-old eyes. If I really want to check out a website, I’m coming back later on my laptop, no matter how “optimized for mobile” your site may be.
While bounce rates average around 40%-60%, (Mashable claims average bounce rate is 50%) bounce rates coming from mobile devices tend to be 10%-20% higher than those of desktop.
Take a look at these Google analytics that show how mobile visitors tend to view less pages and stay for a shorter amount of time.
Some claim that if users aren't sticking around, it’s the quality of the leads coming to the site in the first place. They’ll blame high bounce rates on bad pay-per-click or display advertising. One complaint is that the keywords aren't targeting the right audience.
Allow me to challenge that notion too.
You’re surfing the web. You do a search for a given product or service. Or maybe you’re reading content relevant to something you’re interested in. Later, you see a display ad for that product or service.
If you’re interested in the display ad, you click on it. If you’re not, you don’t. Agreed?
You end up on the site and bounce for one of the many reasons we discussed.
If you weren't a good prospect for the business, would you have clicked the ad in the first place? No. Ads don’t bring the wrong kind of audience to your site – unless the ad copy itself is misleading the prospect.
The argument “the ad is targeting the wrong kinds of prospects, so my bounce rate is high” doesn’t hold water. If the ad is targeting the wrong audience, no one will click on it anyway. I know. When I see ads for purses, make-up and high heels, I don’t click on them. You don’t click on the ads that aren’t relevant to you, do you? Of course not.
So while decreased bounce rates could indicate that your ads are bringing a higher quality lead to the website, increased bounce rates are probably an indication that your website doesn’t offer a good user experience, you’re getting a lot of mobile traffic, or your ads are misleading.
As with other metrics, there are usually a lot of factors that impact bounce rate (both positively and negatively) and a lot of ways to interpret it. It should be looked at from different perspectives and considered along with other metrics on your site.
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