Yes, this was the subject of an email I received last week. Yes, the person who wrote it gave me permission to quote him. No, Iโm not going to name him.
Before going further, letโs remember the difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate.
An exit rate is the percentage of visits to a page that go no further in your website. For example youโd expect the exit rate of your formโs confirmation page to be high.
A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits. For example the number of visits arriving at your home page who go no further in interacting with your website.
Letโs be realistic here. Your main pages are probably going to have a reasonably high bounce rate. People come to your website for all sorts of reasons, and one of the quirks of the search engines is that a number of them will probably looking for something that you donโt provide.
In the case of the person who sent me the panic-struck email, there was nothing wrong with his website.
A quick play with his Google Analytics filters reassured him that a significant percentage of the visits to his main page were looking for something that had no connection with what he was selling.
When we excluded the junk-traffic, we saw that his bounce-rates were actually in the region of 35% โ considerably lower than many other websites that weโve seen.
Of course it didnโt take long for him to realise that there was room for improvement even here. Heโs just engaged our conversion optimisation service to see how we can reduce his bounce rates further, and Iโm confident that heโll be happy with the results.
The bottom line is that balance is a good idea. Thereโs no need to panic when you see your bounce rates, but thereโs no need to accept them either.
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