Visitor Bounce Rate

A Visitor Bounce Rate is a website performance measure that represents the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave ("bounce") without continuing to view other pages within the same site.

• Context:
  • It is (often) defined as the ratio between bounce sessions and non-bounce sessions.
  • It can be a Specific-Page Bounce Rate to being a Site-Wide Bounce Rate.
  • It can be a Bounce Rate After x Pageviews Rate.
  • It can indicate the quality of a page and whether it meets the visitor's expectations.
  • It can vary significantly across different industries, with specific benchmarks for each.
  • It can be influenced by the source of traffic, with different sources such as email, referral, display ads, or social media affecting it differently.
  • It can be higher or lower depending on whether the website is accessed via mobile or desktop, with mobile traffic often experiencing higher bounce rates.
  • It can suggest that the content or user experience (UX) does not match the visitor's intent, possibly due to poor design, slow page load times, or irrelevant content.
  • It can be considered a positive sign if a high bounce rate results from visitors quickly finding the information they need.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • a Website Bounce Rate, e.g. 67.1% of sessions into the site bounce back out.
  • a Webpage Bounce Rate, e.g. 35.7% of sessions that start page are Bounce Sessions.
  • An eCommerce website might have a lower bounce rate as visitors browse through multiple products.
  • A blog post that fully answers a specific question might have a high bounce rate because visitors leave after finding the information they needed.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Exit Rate,
  • Conversion Rate,
  • Average Session Duration,
  • Click-Through Rate.
• See: Cart Abandonment Rate, Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), Internet Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Traffic Analysis, User Experience Design, Page Load Time, Search Engine Optimization, Website Performance, User Engagement Analysis, SEO Optimization.

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References

2024

• (ChatGPT-OpenAI, 2024) ⇒ Prompt: Summarize the concept Visitor Bounce Rate in 1- 2 paragraphs. ChatGPT (model:gpt-4-turbo-preview). Retrieved: 2024-02-25.
  • QUOTE: Visitor Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. It is a vital metric used in web traffic analysis since it gives insights into how engaging and effective a site's content is at capturing the interest of its audience. A high bounce rate often suggests that visitors didn't find what they were looking for or were not sufficiently intrigued to explore further content on the site. This phenomenon can be attributed to several factors, including but not limited to, irrelevant or poor-quality content, a confusing user interface, slow page loading times, or the lack of a clear call to action.

    Understanding and analyzing the bounce rate can help website owners and content creators make informed decisions to enhance user experience and engagement. Strategies to reduce the bounce rate include improving website design, offering compelling and relevant content, optimizing website speed, and ensuring the website is mobile-friendly. By addressing these areas, businesses and content creators can not only lower their bounce rates but also potentially increase their conversion rates, indicating a higher level of visitor engagement and interest in their offerings.

2024b

• (Schneider, 2023) ⇒ Daniel Schneider (2024). "Bounce Rate Explained: Everything You Need to Achieve Growth". In: Similarweb.
  • QUOTE: Bounce rate is calculated by dividing single-interaction visits by total visits to your site, giving you the percentage of total visits during a set period.

    Bounce Rate = Single-Page Visits (Bounces) ÷ Total Visits (Sessions)

2023

• (Dean, 2023) ⇒ Brian Dean (2023). "Bounce Rate". In: Backlinko.
  • QUOTE: Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.

2021

• (de Valk, 2021) ⇒ Thijs de Valk (2021). "Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics". In: Yoast.com.
  • QUOTE: According to Google bounce rate is calculated in the following way:

    "Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server."

    In other words, it collects all sessions where a visitor only visited one page and divides it by all sessions.

    Having a high bounce rate can mean three things:

    • 1. The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
    • 2. Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
    • 3. Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bounce_rate Retrieved:2017-10-27.
  • Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.

2016

• (kissmetrics, 2026) ⇒ https://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-8-most-important-conversion-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/
  • QUOTE: Bounce Rate: Your initial goal when trying to increase all five of the metrics above is to minimize your visitor bounce rate. The Bounce rate is the rate at which new visitors visit your site and immediately click away without doing anything (very low time spent and no interactions). A high bounce rate can mean several things, including weak or irrelevant sources of traffic and landing pages that aren’t optimized for conversion (have a poor design, low usability or high load times). Bounce rates for e-commerce sites are often called abandonment rates, i.e., the rate at which people abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase. This is usually a result of an overly complicated checkout process, expired deals, forced cart additions (e.g. to see the actual price of the product, add to your cart), and so on. ...

2011

• (Wikipedia, 2011) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate#Definition
  • QUOTE: A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

    [math]\displaystyle{ {R_b} {{=}} \left (\frac{T_v}{T_e} \right ) }[/math], where

    • R_b = Bounce rate
    • T_v = Total number of visitors viewing one page only
    • T_e = Total entries to page

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