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
-
GG webmaster tool crawl rate
Hello, I just redid my website and suddenly saw a spike in the crawl rate for about 2 weeks and I am now back to where I was on average. Is it normal ? My guess it that this increase was due to the change in site and new links ? However,I just want to make sure it is normal that it is back to a "normal rate" now that it has discovered all the links. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
SEO mobile app optimization: multi tag link alternate media per every devices is acceptable in the desktop page?
Hi All, Hi hope someone could answer to this question because on internet I haven't found a clear solution so far: I have: 1 desktop website (let's make www.example.com) and different mobile websites for each main device (let's make iphone.example.mobi; android.example.mobi; winphone.example.mobi) In order to optimize my mobile websites, According to the Google guideline of the above separate urls configuration , I should add a tag link alternate media in the desktop page and a canonical tag in the corresponding mobile page in order to create a connection between them. But, I need to keep a 1-to-1 connection between desktop page and mobile page (Google recommends to have 1 desktop page linked to 1 mobile page and viceversa and discourages the 1-to-multi connections). What I would like: In my case, I have to add the a single desktop page of desktop site (example www.example.com/category1/), 3 links alternate media tag,( one for iphone.example.mobi, one for android.example.mobi and one for winphone.example.mobi). Furthemore, I have to add a canonical tag in every corresponding mobile page of the 3 mobile site version, a canonical tag pointing to my sektop page www.example.com/category1/. Now my worries are: having a single desktop page with 3 different link alternate tags pointing to 3 different mobile websites (one each), is something or not aligned to the google seo mobile guideline? If not, How should I configure my desktop website and my 3 mobile web applications(iphone, android, winphone) in order to follow the Google requirements for Separate urls apllication? Thanks, Massimliano
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
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 -
Adding video snippet caused drop of star rating snippet in google SERP. Any solution to show both?
We are using on our product pages review schema markup which showed up well in google SERP. Now we added schema video markup as well and google shows in SERP now only the video snippet, but not the review snippet anymore. Any idea whether there may be a solution to show both video and review snippets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Rich Snippets Ratings For Q&A Discussions, Articles,
Hi, I'm looking for how I can use a star rating for a q&a discussion or article/blog post to achieve a rich snippets search result. I'm thinking about a user rating for "Was this helpful?" 1 to 5 stars. As I look at schema.org and do and other reading on it, it looks like it's possible to rate only a set group of content types, blogs and discussions not included. However, I've seen rich snippets ratings in SERPs for blog posts, like this example https://www.google.com/search?q=erp+implementation+challenges&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=panorama+consulting+blog&client=firefox-a&hs=gId&hl=en&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&ei=QmCBUYLLCOfwiwKHhIAQ&start=20&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45921128,d.cGE&fp=eb2f15e2a98a4631&biw=2144&bih=995 On page, it looks like they used some simple span tags. So, my question is, which content type category does that fit into for rating and is that strategy safe enough going forward? Also, are there more steps to making this work? It it is okay to have users rate the helpfulness of a discussion or article and get rich snippets, I'd kinda like to do it. Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Rich Snippet for testimonials without star ratings
A product in our website has testimonial, but does not have ratings? Would Google rich snippets include these? Is there an example out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tmg.seo0 -
Confirmation Needed: Do any search engine crawlers accept cookies?
I'm looking for confirmation here. Do any search engine crawlers accept cookies? I thought that the answer was always no, but we're looking in our weblogs and seeing some odd behavior.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
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