What is an acceptable bounce rate?
-
0% is of course the best case and 100% would be the worst case but what would is considered average. How do you address this subject with your clients?
-
I use www.blizzardmetrics.com to analyze bounce rates from a benchmark standpoint. Here is some data from November 2016 for 135 websites - Overall Bounce Rate 39.7%, Mobile Bounce Rate: 43.1%, Tablet Bounce Rate 53.7, Desktop Bounce Rate 39.7, Bounce rate from Organic Search Engines 38.4%, Bounce Rate from Direct Type-in: 59.9%, Bounce Rate from Referrals 28.7 (something fishy here, it was 54.1% in October and 69.4% in Nov 16), Bounce Rate from email 61.4 and Bounce Rate from Social 35.3.
This data is dynamic, if you head over to Blizzardmetrics, and add your site, all the numbers will update! If you are an agency and add a bunch of website, you can look at JUST your websites, or, all websites. You can also categorize by industry.
-
I have worked on well over 250 websites and most sites I have worked on have a BR from 15% to 50% and one as low as 3%, but instead of speculating in what is good or not why not let the words from Google's own Analytics Guru tell us what his POV is: "According to Google Analytics Guru Avinash Kausik “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying”. Low/Good bounce rate indicates that visitor engagement on your site is good." There you have it. To add some statistical research here some research findings from rocketfuel.com that has his numbers staggered a little bit different, but kind of along the lines with Avinash: "As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc. - See more at: http://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics "
-
Thanks for the great advice. It is Greatly appreciated.
James Gonzales
-
Once you drill down to keywords, pages, time-on page and %exit, I think you'll probably see pretty quickly where you can address some things that will help.
I think you're right on the money with keeping your content fresh.
Good luck.
-
Thanks for the help on this. I went back and looked at our history and noticed that on each site we own our bounce rate increased as traffic to our sites increased. Early on we had our best site with a bounce rate of 36% and a year later we are at 41%. Our product is real estate. I may need to re-fresh our content on the landing pages or maybe it is just the increase and the quality of inbound links that have affected this metric.
-
Depends on the purpose of the page too.
EG: If your call to action of a page is to call a phone number, then a high bounce rate is acceptable due to the purpose being met.
Bounce rate is a great metric to measure improvements and calls to action. Try and get it lower by all means, but there's no silver bullet with bounce rate or magic number.
As David mentioned, a bounce could mean elimination of an unqualified lead, either way it's quality over quantity in most cases.Good luck.
-
Sorry, but there's no one-size-fits-all answer regarding what is acceptable and unacceptable. You should be taking into consideration the intent of the site to help determine what is acceptable. Let me give you an example:
One of our landing pages had a bounce rate of 58%. This was problematic because the landing was designed to generate leads. In essence we only had a shot at converting the 42% of traffic that didn't bounce when they hit the page. And of those, we were converting about 6%. For that particular product, we converted 5 out of every 100 leads generated, and the average lifetime value of the client was about $3K.
Long story short, it worth our time to deal with the higher bounce rate because the potential value of each lead was rather substantial. So, take it on a case-by-case basis, but remember that it's been said Google takes bounces rates into consideration as a ranking factor.
-
I would suggest a couple of things.
First of all I would suggest that bounce rate could be compared to a pulse. Over time, you'll discover an acceptable bounce rate (pulse) for a particular site and those rates may vary from site to site. An acceptable site bounce rate for us is about 50-55%. If the rate pushes toward 60%, it tells me there is something going on that I need to investigate more deeply.
If you're in ecommerce, product feeds will affect your bounce rate and you'll need to identify products that adversely inflate your bounce rate and address accordingly.
Secondly, bounce rate also applies to pages (which in turn affects site rate). Its relatively easy to identify pages that are affecting bounce rate. I know what pages on our site will have a higher bounce rate than others. If there is something I can do do reduce the bounce rate for a page, I do it.
Having said all that, I would throw a guess out there that an acceptable bounce rate would be between 45 and 65% with a rate in the 50% being realistic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I set a max crawl rate in Webmaster Tools?
We have a website with around 5,000 pages and for the past few months we've had our crawl rate set to maximum (we'd just started paying for a top of the range dedicated server at the time, so performance wasn't an issue). Google Webmaster Tools has alerted me this morning that the crawl rate has expired so I'd have to manually set the rate again. In terms of SEO, is having a max rate a good thing? I found this post on Moz, but it's dated from 2008. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur0 -
Ratings Snippets Gone? ( Help! )
Hello We had good traffic from ratings ( stars ) . I have added Offer details in the rich snippets in various currencies - the snippet testing tool likes it , but for some reason the stars on my site have completely dissapeared and been gone for almost a week. I need the offer information in there for google shopping automatic updates and google told me that it's implemented correctly for the shopping part.. but I really don't know what to do about this. Any ideas why would be really appreciated. http://www.return2health.net/yeast-imbalance/threelac-candida-defence/ Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Does Having A High PPC Bounce Rate Affect Organic SERPs?
Hi Mozzers. My website uses a landing page for Google Adwords traffic targeting keywords like HR Software, HR Systems etc. The design of the landing page is similar to our website but a key difference is that, being a landing page, we've removed the navigation (it is still possible to navigate to the main website by clicking on the logo). We've A/B tested this and found that by removing the navigation we get more people converting/signing up for the free trial of our service. We track conversions using Google Analytics. Depending on the keyword the conversion rate is between 2.5% and 5%. However, because we've removed the navigation the bounce rate is really high, circa 80% for our landing page compared to an average for our website of approx 40%. Would having such a high bounce rate harm our organic rankings for the rest of the website? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
Does putting a Google custom search box on make Google think my users are bouncing?
I added a Google custom search box to my pages, that's doing an advanced Google search. A lot of people are using it. So users are coming to my site from a Google search, and then often performing another Google search on my site. Should I be worried that Google may interpret the resultant user behavior as a bounce or pogo-stick? Or will the fact that the second search occurred on my site, using custom search, and with advanced parameters signal to Google that this is not a dissatisfied user returning to Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GilReich0 -
Product Feed Contributing To Bounce Rate
We subscribe to a product feed and have been very pleased with the results. However, one of the unanticipated results is a trending increase in our site bounce rate. Should we be concerned about this 3-10% increase in bounce rate trend. It may go higher. Of all the factors that can contribute to bounce rate, one of the factors is that we have a lot of products on the site that cannot be shipped out of state or shipped at all. These products can only be delivered in-state or picked up at our store. The Analytics data suggests that feed products typically have a higher bounce rate, lower ctr, lower time on page, lower time on site etc. than products found by other means. However, the product feed generates sales. Should I take these products off the feed that have a high bounce rate and are not "shipable"? Although they may land on feed product, they may click through to a shipable product. Our feed provider says of the bounce rate is typically not something a lot of other merchants worry about. I'm not certain, but I'm inclined to disagree. What are your thoughts and experiences with this? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0 -
How to Set Custom Crawl Rate in Google Webmaster Tools?
This is really silly question to set custom crawl rate in Google webmaster tools. Any one can find out that section under setting tab. But, I have confusion to decide number for request per second and second between requests text field. I want to set custom crawl rate for my eCommerce website. I checked my Google webmaster tools and find out as attachment. So, Can I use this facility to improve my crawling? 6233755578_33ce83bb71_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?
Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse. We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site. I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron0