The ‘bounce rate’ is a metric that measures how many visitors enter a site and do not progress beyond the landing page before leaving… or more simply put, it is a single-page session. It is measured as a percentage and can be calculated by taking the total number of single page visits to a site (or page) divided by the total number of entrances to a site (or page), multiplied by 100.
BOUNCE RATE = (Total single page visits / Total number of entrances ) x 100
Why do site visitors bounce?
Visitors bounce for a whole host of reasons such as:
- Following an external link off the page
- Returning to search results
- Typing something new into the URL or search bar
- Being inactive for a certain period of time
- Closing the browser
- Phone or laptop running out of battery!
Bounce rate by industry
There are however plenty of statistics out there which give a breakdown of average bounce rate by industry.
It’s important not to get hung up on such data, as even when grouped by sector, the benchmarks can be too broad to make any meaningful comparisons. A bounce rate for ‘financial services’ for example, might include everyday personal finance products such as credit cards, mortgages and car insurance, through to stocks and shares and pensions, all of which may vary.
Bounce rate by channel
Bounce rates don’t just differ by industry, they also differ by channel.
Site entrances from paid adverts tend to have a much higher bounce rate than a visitor who arrives via organic search. Display advertising, in particular, tends to have an extremely high bounce rate – especially when the ad is a pop-up or poorly placed and served to a disinterested audience. A user who has unintentionally clicked on these ads will do everything in their power to quickly get back to the content they were actually intending to view.
Social media often has a fairly high bounce rate too, as the user tends to browse on their platform of choice and sporadically selects other content to view from third parties, but returns to their feed immediately afterwards. This doesn’t mean the user is disinterested but they often don’t venture past the specific content share they saw in the first place.
It’s for this reason that the bounce rate of a blog post (or the blog as a whole) is often relatively high compared to site averages. It’s a little disparaging for content producers but is a common phenomenon.
The more engaged the audience, the more likely it is that they’ll be interested in the other content that a site has to offer. Therefore customers who have signed up to a newsletter, or a visitor whose long tail search is answered well, are much more likely to engage with other pages and therefore lower the bounce rate, than someone who casually comes across a site for the first time via a Facebook post.
Bounce rate by device
Bounce rate is also affected by device.
It is fairly obvious that a mobile user is generally more flighty – flipping between apps and tasks with a simple swipe. In general, tasks that are more complicated, or that require in-depth reading or research, are often undertaken on a laptop or desktop PC. Tablets fall somewhere in between.
Bounce rates follow suit here so mobile searches generally have a higher bounce rate, tablets are a little lower and desktop searches are generally lower again.