What does bounce rate mean on Google Analytics?

Bounce rate is the percentage of initial visitors to your site who left your site without continuing to other pages in the site. It is the measurement of visitors who left your visitors instantly. It is the measurement of visitors who stayed on the site for just 5 seconds or less. The quality of traffic coming to your website can be measured using Bounce rate.

How the visitors bounce?

Closing the browser
Closing an open window or tab
Typing a new URL
Clicking on a link and moved to different web site
Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site
Session timeout (The cookie session is set default for 30 minutes and if the visitor opened a page and idle for more than 30 minutes, then he is measured as bounced back.)

Why the visitors bounce?

Not User Friendly: The website is not user friendly and makes your visitor to leave the site instantly.

Page load time: Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. Slow loading pages will chase your visitors away and reduce the number of pages that they will visit on your site.
Accessibility: Your web site is not accessible to people with disabilities and at the same time to people using different operating systems, web browsers and devices.
Navigation: Navigation is not simple and intuitive in your website. Major areas of navigation are not located consistently on all pages.
Information: The information’s provided in your website is not sufficient to meet the expectations of your visitors.
Improper SEO: Your web pages are optimized with the wrong goal in mind. The pages are optimized with wrong keywords, tile tags and description.

How to use the Bounce Rate Metric?

Many of your web analytics tools provide the bounce rate statistics. Bounce rate metrics on different criteria will help us to understand the performance of the site and the ways to improve the site.

Few criteria which can be measured:

Website: Average bounce rate of the site clearly indicates the performance of the site. It gives the exact details of visitors who are engaged with your site. If your site overall bounce rate is 60% which means only 40% of the visitors continued to visit the other pages in the site.

Campaigns: Bounce rate is a very useful metric to measure the performance of your paid campaigns. The performance of your paid campaign attributes like adgroups, keywords, ad variations, landing page, newsletter, banners etc can be measured using this metric. The non performing attributes can be stopped or improved to increase the ROI.

Keywords: Bounce rate of keywords can be useful to measure the performance of the SEO activity carried out in the website. High bounce rate of a keyword indicates the page is wrongly optimized for that keyword. This metrics will help you to re-optimize your web pages with the correct keywords and Meta tags.

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