You log in to your Google Analytics account and everything looks good aside from a high bounce rate. “Yikes! Are people clicking through to my website and then immediately bouncing out?”

Take a deep breath. Estland’s online marketing professionals in Harrisonburg might have some good news for you. But first, let’s take a look at what a “bounce rate” is.

What Does Bounce Rate Actually Mean?

A “bounce” is when an online visitor goes to your website and then leaves without exploring other pages. Sometimes that might be someone who accidentally clicks through and immediately leaves, or someone who doesn’t immediately see what they’re looking for. If Google is sending the “wrong people” to your site, you need to optimize your content to get the sort of visitors you are looking for.

Google Analytics counts single-page clicks (where visitors don’t click other pages) as a bounce. A bounce rate is the total number of bounces on every page of your site, divided by the number of times someone visited your site during a given time period. In other words, it’s an average of single-page visits. If the average time spent on your site is a few minutes, and you have a high bounce rate, that most likely means that visitors got what they wanted all within a single page. Average bounce rates vary between 25% and 70%, depending on the industry. Online retail sites tend to have fewer bounces because online customers are browsing and comparing different options. 

When Is A High Bounce Rate A Good Thing?

If your site is well-planned and designed with content that is optimized for the right customers, a high bounce rate probably means people found what they were looking for. At Estland we tend to design all pages with the intent to capture a lead which we typically call a conversion. If the page captures a conversion, we are less worried about bounce rate for the page.

Think about the last time you ordered take-out from your favorite restaurant. If you visited their website, you were most likely looking for the menu, their hours of operation or a phone number. If all of that information was easily accessible on one page, you would have had no need to rummage around on their site. The restaurant made a sale and you enjoyed dinner without having to cook. Win-win. 

Our web designers in Harrisonburg build websites with forms on every page and a strong call to action within a single page which can create a huge boost in conversion rate but is tracked as a “bounce” by Google because the user doesn’t go past the page to a secondary page.

Next time you log in to Google Analytics, don’t panic if you see a high bounce rate. Take a look at the other data and try to determine if your online visitors are finding what they’re looking for.