At What Rate Does Your Website Bounce?

Contrary to reason, the term “bounce rate” has nothing to do with balls or trampolines. Nor does it have anything to do with bars — but feel free to ask a bouncer what his “bounce rate” for the evening is and see how long it takes him to add you to his numbers.

No, in the world of websites a bounce rate is the number of people who visited the first page of your website and then left without looking at anything else. It’s important to measure and track these types of visits because a high bounce rate generally indicates that people aren’t finding what they’re looking for on your site.

And if people aren’t finding what they’re looking for? That’s a problem. That means you have to take a hard, critical look at your website. Is your message unclear? Is your navigation disorganized? Does your site’s design make it look suspiciously spammy? Are irritating popup windows and ads blocking your content? Does everything take too long to load? Are irrelevant keywords making for some bad SEO?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, take a look at this handy infographic from KISSmetrics that will help demystify bounce rate. It explains how bounces are counted, the bounce metrics of an average website by industry, and ways to improve (i.e., lower) bounce rate.

And if you still have questions on how to improve your website’s bounce rates, or on how you can start tracking it in the first place, we can help.