What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

If you get regular reports from your SEO company or you’ve ever looked at your Google Analytics dashboard, you will see a number called “Bounce Rate”. You might be wondering what that means or whether the number you see there is a good number. If you’re paying someone to make sure that your website is performing well, how can you know if they’re doing their job? Can you trust what they tell you about the data you’re seeing?

What is Bounce Rate?

Simply put, ‘bounce rate’ is the percentage of visits who view one page and then leave. Among SEO experts, this definition can get a lot more complicated, but what you need to know for determining your business’s website performance is that when someone visits your site and doesn’t click through to any other page, that is called a “bounce”.

Is My Bounce Rate Good?

Well, this is a tricky question. There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all answer for the definition of a “good bounce rate”, as the engagement you want your site to have with users is highly dependent on what you want your site to do.

If you are in a service industry, say, heating and air, and your site is designed to get people to call you, then having a high bounce rate might not matter at all to you as long as the phone is ringing. After all, you want people to call. Your phone number is right there in the header, so it’s the first thing people see. You’re keeping busy with the service calls you have. Life is good, so who cares about a bounce rate?

On the other hand, let’s say you have an e-commerce site and your business is highly dependent on people clicking around your site to find products to purchase. In this case, having a high bounce rate lets you know that you have a problem somewhere. Maybe it’s a technical problem, or maybe your marketing funnel isn’t working like it is designed to (or maybe you don’t even have a marketing funnel!).

There are many factors to consider when deciding what a good bounce rate looks like for your website. If, as in the example above, you have an e-commerce platform and your bounce rate feels high (we’d say upwards of about 50-55%), then you might have cause for concern. If, however, your site has a blog — and especially if those blog articles get shared through social media, then having a higher bounce rate can easily be attributed to visitors reading your blog post and then leaving. News sites commonly have bounce rates higher than 70% and it’s not a cause for alarm. Similarly, the presence of a blog can skew your site’s overall bounce rate numbers.

So… Is My Bounce Rate Good Or What?

So keeping in mind all the disclaimers above, we can give you some ranges for benchmarking your own bounce rate. General rules of thumb put a “good” bounce rate around 30-40%. Below that is excellent… and highly unusual. 41-55% is about average, and if we have a marketing funnel in place we might start taking a look at ways to improve this number. 56-70% is starting to get high, and for our typical client, we are definitely taking a look at how we can increase engagement with our client’s users. Above 70% for anything other than a news site should probably tell you that you need to have your site looked at by a consultant.

An inbound marketing company can help you pinpoint whether your problem is technical, marketing-related, or if there is another problem. By analyzing your traffic, how you’re getting it, where it’s exiting, etc., they can help you put together a plan for how to get your website back on track and doing its job.

Waypost Marketing is your partner for your entire digital strategy. If you have questions or would like to learn more about how we can help you get the leads you need from your website, call us today at (864) 288-6162 or contact us online to schedule your free consultation.