Bounce rate is a mathematic figure used for web traffic analysis to understand the users behavior for the pages that they landed from various sources. It is a one of major UI/UX metrics to consider your complete website navigation architecture including how your pages are interlinked with each other.

Bounce Rate Calculation

Bounce rate of any page is calculated as a percentage of total bounces per total entrances.

Mathematically,

Bounce rate = (Total Bounces/Total Entrances)X100%

For example: If we have 100 total visitors for the website homepage and 40 of them bounces back without surfing other pages in website, then it’s bounce rate will be

Bounce rate=(40/100)x100%
=40%

The overall website’s bounce rate is calculated in the same fashion.

Optimal Bounce Rates For Different Industries

As per google analytics benchmark, the bounce rate of an average website is 40% but in regular practice, it depends on the type of campaign, nature of a content, main motive of the page and how overall conversion is tracked. So depending upon the types of online businesses, the standard value of bounce rate should be following:

• Content websites 40-60%
• Lead generation sites 30-50%
• Blogs 70-98%
• Retail sites 20-40%
• Service sites 10-30%
• Landing pages 70-90%

The higher bounce rates that its optimal value as per industries is one of the major signal that affects ranking and overall website performance. There are numbers of reasons that contribute to high bounce rates and some issues to consider are:

• Poor Site Architecture
• Nonrelevant contents
• Confused Navigation
• Different from basic design convention
• Website not optimized for mobile devices
• Unwanted ads, pop-ups and push sales
• Not having content variation
• No use of whitespaces
• Readability issues with formatting
• Autoplay audio and videos

However, a user might leave the first landed page if they’ve found the relevant content as per their requirement and bounced back happily. So in this case, we can use the concept of remarketing by pitching relevant topics or offers to drive to other pages so that our bounce rate remains optimal.

How to improve bounce rate?

As we have numbers of reasons that can assure to our high bounce rate, we can apply following counterpart to obtain our ideal bounce rate and improve over time

• Pitch relevant and in-depth content
• Focus on site structure, navigation, user interface and user interaction
• Use sidebar and footer section for remarketing
• Optimize your anchor text and link among pages
• Learn with self-experience and don’t practice or use anything that you don’t like when you are surfing other websites or pages.