What is a Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits to your website that end with only 1 page visited. This means someone saw your website on their screen, and chose not to click on anything else. They figuratively bounced off your website because they landed, and then left.
Who Cares?
Bounce rate is a valuable metric because it is often a indicator of visitor confusion. Why would a visitor to your website bounce?
- If they don’t see what they thought you were going to see (They were not searching for homes in this area or of this type)
- They are confused by the information presented (Poor presentation)
- They don’t like what they see (Poor design or the wrong style of homes and communities)
- They found exactly what they needed (Huh? We’ll come back to this one.)
Best Use
A increase in, or a high site-wide, bounce rate can often be hard to diagnose. It’s normally a symptom of a more targeted problem. You can see average home builder website bounce rates here. Like other popular metrics, bounce rate is often best used to measure the quality of specific traffic sources, and also the performance of specific pages on your website.
Look at the Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics and examine the Bounce Rate column. If traffic source A and B are sending you an equal volume of traffic, compare the bounce rate column. If one has a 25% Bounce Rate and the other has a 55% Bounce Rate, the answer of who is sending you better quality traffic will be clear.
Bounce rate is invaluable for landing page performance measurement. If you’re not familiar with landing pages, read our definition here. Tweaking the design and usability of landing pages over time to drive more conversions and lower the bounce rate is a smart marketing.
When is a bounce a good thing? Consider the task oriented web surfer; The shopper who just wants to quickly find your phone number or model address and directions. If they Googled this question and got their answer on the first page of your website they saw, this is a good thing. In this case your website did the job and met the needs of the consumer efficiently. They had not need to go past the first page. Consider this when you’re grading your landing pages.
Note: It is common for paid advertising to have a higher bounce rate than other sources of traffic.
