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
-
Agency VS Freelancer: Industry rates for a GOOD link builder
Hello Moz Community, I am looking to hire a link builder for SEO purposes. What are the normal rates and what I should expect for my money? Can you guys please share your knowledge with me so I am better prepared when hiring the right person! Bonus point for tips on what to look for when hiring someone and also best places to look for an SEO specialist! I look forward to all your replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xlucax0 -
I am lost at where to go. My optimization rating is 95% + and rankings are on pages 4+. I would like to know what I should do to increase my rankings.
My site is Glare-Guard.com. My Domain Authority has not moved from 17 in a long time. i have done everything to optimize the different pages. I have 90%+ ratings for the various pages, yet I am still not even close to the first page for many of the keywords I am looking to rank for. Do you have any tips or ideas? Should I try to rewrite my content and add more information? I am just at a loss for where I should go to get the right traffic to my site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigskyinc0 -
Improve Response Rate
Hi fellow Mozzers, I have recently been trying to earn new links for my company websites by appealing to local public libraries that line up with our geographic footprint. We have store locations in 569 city, state combinations, so I am finding the local library for each city, state and asking them to add us to their website as a community reference for child care. Here is my pitch email that I am sending out.... Hi There, _ I hope this email finds you in good health and good spirits. _ My name is XXXXX and I represent <insert company="" name="">. I am reaching out to local libraries in the cities and counties where our schools are located in an effort to request local support for our schools. Many libraries across the country have reached out to us asking for parent resources and child care options in their local city. I would like to extend the same value to you.</insert> _ I would love to have our school in <insert city="" name="">be considered for placement on your public library site found at <insert target="" website="" url="">. With ample parent resources and child related materials, our school would be a great fit for your local community. We have many great parenting articles, blogs and local child care options in <insert city="" name="">.</insert></insert></insert>_ Our local school website can be found at : Our parent resource section can be found at: Who do you suggest I speak with regarding earning a placement on your site? Any information would be greatly appreciated. So far I have a response rate of about 1% and of those that do respond, none are willing to add a link on their site in any capacity since our company is privately held and not a public school option. Can anyone suggest either a better way to approach link earning on a city by city basis or help me improve my current initial email to get a better response? I really appreciate it! p.s.... some of my other link targets are city run websites, local chamber of commerce chapters (suspect this will be hard since most require a paid membership), local public school sites, and keyword targeted lists such as "child care in phoenix, az" to see what sites come for each term. Advice on these and anything I may be missing would be of great value.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsinger0 -
Google Analytics: how to filter out pages with low bounce rate?
Hello here, I am trying to find out how I can filter out pages in Google Analytics according to their bounce rate. The way I am doing now is the following: 1. I am working inside the Content > Site Content > Landing Pages report 2. Once there, I click the "advanced" link on the right of the filter field. 3. Once there, I define to "include" "Bounce Rate" "Greater than" "0.50" which should show me which pages have a bounce rate higher of 0.50%.... instead I get the following warning on the graph: "Search constraints on metrics can not be applied to this graph" I am afraid I am using the wrong approach... any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How can a page be top rated for a phrase it does not have?
Hi, While looking to buy a Christmas gift to my wife I was searching for yellow diamonds. Being a bit familiar with SEO I gotta understand how the following page was ranked 4th for "yellow diamonds": http://www.bluenile.com/diamonds/fancy-color-diamonds The phrase yellow diamonds is not mentioned even once! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
High Bounce Rate
I found something interesting in Google analytic 2 days ago i started getting visitors from a referral source called yndir.com if I click on it , it say the referral path is /adserver/showinterstitial.php there have been 300+ visitors in last 2 days and before that nothing. the site is pushing my bounce rate up. 3 days ago bounce rate was at around 50%, because of this site the bounce rate went up to over 75% already in 2 days... is this some sort of attack , i don't understand? when i go to yndir.com it says its yahoo directory? weird
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0 -
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 -
When doing email blogger outreach what response rate do you expect?
How many emails do you send in the average outreach campaign? How many links would you expect from that? Also - when doing email blogger outreach do you need to offer the blogger something other than (great) content, in order to get a link? (maybe cash, or a link back?) I'm doing email blogger outreach for a number of clients and types of content, but am finding it hard to get links from bloggers. Any help is appreaciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinmorley0